Serpentine kinetic sculpture

1979 was a big year for us. We moved into the house/studio Marji and I had spent the previous year building and, our first child, Amanda was born. Life changing events that seemed "normal" at the time.

Wood That Works and my progress in learning to design and build kinetic sculptures also saw some big changes that year. The combination of a much nicer work space with new family obligations led to a burst of creativity and problem solving. The 5 pieces I designed and produced that year, Blizzard, Crustacean, Kaleidoscope, Serenity, and Serpentine all broke new ground in both mechanism design and complex pattern creation.

Kaleidoscope was the most popular sculpture with the public but my personal favorite was Serpentine. It produced a random, chaotic motion that I never tired of watching. That turned out to be a good thing because getting the individual sculptures to perform correctly turned out to be a fairly tedious chore of watching, tuning, tweaking and then more watching, tuning and tweaking. There was a fairly narrow range of operation where the sculpture would perform the way I liked it and yet not stall.

My mechanisms are more refined today but each sculpture still requires a period of testing and tweaking, but no where near as much as Serpentine did back in 1979!

Cascade Kinetic Sculpture - 1980

Cascade is a sculpture I designed and built in 1980. Like all my early work this is a weight driven sculpture with a relatively short run time of 20 minutes or so. I used a version catch and release ball mechanism concept that I originally designed for Kaleidoscope 1 in 1979. It's a bit noisy and jerky at times but I was thrilled that it actually worked and had an interesting motion.

I've used very short weight strings in the video so I can show both weights at the same time. Normally the string length would be set so that the light weight starts on the floor and the heavy weight just below the sculpture. The weight on the right has about 5 pounds of metal encased in the wood shape. The left hand weight is the counter weight and is solid wood.

But Does it Tell Time?

by Marji 

David has been building kinetic sculptures for over 30 years and there are a series of questions that keep surfacing. Variations of "But does it tell time?" is a classic. There are many talented clock makers out there and telling time has never been David's goal. There just isn't enough motion in a clock. Or so we thought until I saw this video on Youtube. Here is a clock that definitely qualifies as a kinetic sculpture as well!

And How Did You Spend Your Vacation?

by Marji

David and I decided to spend our vacation doing a collaborative outdoor sculpture. It is a design that has been rattling around in my head for awhile but we never had the time to make it a reality. Last week it became priority #1. We combined my design with David’s refinements, technical assistance and problem-solving skills and together built “Trilogy”. 

The final sculpture is almost 10 feet high and, yes, it does move. It is not powered like Dave’s traditional work but the two inner tetrahedrons rotate in the breeze creating many varied compositions. “Trilogy” resides in the woods near our home. It was a great vacation week!

Kinetic sculpture for a horizontal wall

As my daughter Karen was growing up she declared that when she had a house she was going to have a big wall and I was going to put a big sculpture on it. The years went by, Karen is all grown up now and last December she bought a beautiful condo with her husband Jared. And of course it did have a big, wonderful, empty wall, perfect for a sculpture. Even better, Karen offered to assist me with a redesign of the woodthatworks.com web site and internet marketing in general, her field of expertise, in exchange for the sculpture

Now the dilemma was, what sculpture. Their favorite piece was one I did a few years ago called Gemini. This is also one of my favorite sculptures but I had a few problems with putting it in this location. First, I had recently mounted it in the perfect spot on a vertical wall in our new sun room and I wanted to keep it there for a while. The other problem was that they had this nice big horizontal wall and as is the case with most of my sculptures, Gemini is a vertical oriented sculpture.

Karen took a photo of the wall and sent it to me with some measurements. I scaled the original Adobe Illustrator drawing of Gemini to fit the wall and brought it into Adobe After Effects to animate. This is the best way I’ve found to get an idea of how a sculpture will look on a wall with everything else that surrounds it.

As I had expected, the animation showed the sculpture just wasn’t a good fit for the wall. Now I got to design something new for a horizontal space. I don’t usually design for a wall, except for the special case of the large vertical wall in our living room I’ve pretty much let my sculptures dictate the form they wanted to take. I liked the challenge of this horizontal space.

I knew Gemini was their favorite piece so I took that as a starting point, using the same bird forms and carriers but making them independent of each other. This would spread the action into the horizontal axis and would create a new interplay between the two halves of the sculpture.

I liked where this was going but now I needed a way to tie the two halves together and a mechanism to keep them going. I sketched out several ideas. This is one.

The mechanism was getting too complicated and I didn’t like the way the drive belts looked. I took a step back and realized that I should be thinking of this as two separate sculptures. Everything fell into place after that. Two mechanisms simplified the operation of the sculpture without changing the motion or the run time. It also made the sculpture more flexible for final installation into the location.

Karen and Jared named the sculpture Merengue. I’ll let Karen explain why.