“FRACTAL LOTUS - A Story Within Consciousness ”
The piece of stone above is a hefty little slab of Hinuera Stone, (compressed volcanic ash), 90cm at it's
widest, 70cm high and 10cm thick. At this stage it appears to have a nicely fine grained texture with few
inclusions and little pattern to it. First indications are that it is quite a "tough" slab which equates to time
consuming to sculpt with a reasonable finish possible.
The design process started like this: having ascertained a suitable orientation i let it be, to allow the creative
juices flow, (as in i hadn’t a clue..... and also to let my back recover from lifting it onto the work bench),
although i had decided there was a particular element of style i wanted to play with.
In the same period i was contemplating the Electric Universe stuff and it's vast array of empirical evidence
(see thunderbolts.org), the solar wind that was buffeting the earth at the time and it's various ramifications. i
noted the slab of stone had a long axis, enough to represent arrays of flow, and ample depth to fit a globe
form. i drew a circle.
Click the images for a bigger view.
Solar winds and Birkeland Currents (twisted ropes of electricity in interstellar space) are often depicted like
height contours on land maps and thus i drew representations of flow around the orb, i chose six because it is a
number i like, possibly because numerologically speaking i am all sixes, (but no mention of sevens). To my
thinking it seemed logical to represent the earth by it's major generalized components, eg fire, air, earth,
water, and i had this idea of how to represent the air with a pattern form i adopted for this purpose way back
in the bone carving days and it should make a defining circle around the earth form. How i was going to
incorporate the other elements and the element of style i wanted to use, somewhat escaped me........... but
that's normal. i simply left the whole thing for a few days.
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Although not having anything much definitive for the globe contents at this stage, and usually liking to sculpt
most sculptures as a whole, i felt defining the "electric" lines around the globe could be done to near
completion as they were unlikely to change and having them present would help define the contents to be.
i chose a tubular form of flow as the end cross section of the direction of an electric current tends to be
defined as a form of magnetic tube, and it was easy to form in the stone with good light graduations for shadow
definitions.
i did six, it did not look right, looked more like an object in it's own right rather than the sea of energy
everything is surrounded by. A couple of days later i added more flow lines.
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So here we are a week later and now seeing hints of the divine(?) feminine surrounding the earth(?)........ and
indications of detail within the globe form. Because even to my mind, it is not demonstrating the appropriate
aspects of earlier thoughts i had better explain the changes at least a little.
A couple of years ago i sculpted a work i have ended up titling "Triunity", it was a piece that basically drew
itself and flowed in pleasant ways, it is still one of my favourites. It was both familiar to me and yet
unknown, it sort of should have made sense to me but didn't. Here is a link to it. About a year ago or so Cliff
High from halfpasthuman.com had mentioned in his writings a book called “Thinking and Destiny by Harold.
W. Percival”, it caught my attention and i downloaded a copy and started reading. One of the core elements
of the book is the triune nature of human consciousness with it's various aspects. Reading the book was like
reminding myself, or some aspect thereof, and quite an extraordinary experience (for me), then i realized
what the earlier sculpture was getting at...........
To link that, the plans for the globe element in the centre somehow changed mid flight or rather gelled in a
different direction and yet were related.......
i decided to try and express the inexpressible (now i think on it) in stone, it cannot be done, i do know that,
but none the less it could create a space to ponder, to delve into self a little and of course opportunity to slag
off the stone a bit for not being up to the job, (hehe mirror, mirror.....). In broad terms our triune nature is
too big(?), maybe too encompassing(?), to express into the limitations of what we term and experience as
physical reality. At times all of us experience hints of a deeper part of ourselves, a something that we seem
to be searching for....... a something, label as you will, within the physical usually. That searching is basically
a search for wholeness however that may be for each of us within our unique defined parameters.
Now the part of our triune selves that expresses into physical reality is but a twelfth part of one of the three
aspects that is personal consciousness unchangeable, and that leaves an awful lot not present in physical
reality at any one point.......... So i decided to depict an inter-related aspect of a triune self within the
context of a physical reality, this earth.
Having looked at the plans so far, if push comes to shove, i can always claim it is some other triune from off
planet maybe, so then it's alien and how could we understand it........ Right then did you get any
understanding from that? if not don’t worry as that puts us both on pretty much the same page.
i have no idea how to do this really but the above is the intent behind the work and with luck it should make
for an interesting sculpture. It may change a bit but either way it is slow work, lot's of time to contemplate.
This part involves involves defining the depths of the sculpture and removing the un-needed stone. The cutout
around the central object is taking me a lot of hours, it's deeper than it looks, and thus the Hammer Dome is
certainly living up to it's name. i have hit a personal feeling spot i recognize from other sculpts, that little
nest of ambivalent feeling about what i am seeing in front of me and how to redeem it.
What i can see though is that the outer ring, when it has it's detail added, will define things rather nicely, i can
actually sort of see that in my mind's eye, it's not something that i can usually do..........
Yep i know. "but you are a sculptor(?) surely you can 'see' what you are doing". Nope i have never been
able to do that, so the end result is always somewhat of a surprise to me.
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18 March - Just a quick update there has been a bit of a delay with weather, 500mm of rain resulted in cleanup
time.
These next two images are my progress as i attempt to make sense in 3D, of the centre section, the
interconnected nature of it............ It is all very well to draw something but then there is the figuring out, by
doing, of how it actually goes and there is only the one chance. So far i am at the defining of the various planes
and levels, a sort of near enough blocking out by careful removal of a lot of stone, all interspersed with thoughts
of how it may be embellished later when i start refining everything up.
Since posting the above two photos there has been two very specific ideas(?) of what is to come next that have
presented themselves, one minute nothing and then they are there. This is different in my experience and i am
beginning to wonder just a little bit. One of the ideas i am not so sure the stone will hold the finer nature of the
pattern suggested(?) if that is what eventuates...... i’m guessing i just need to trust a bit and maybe imply
aspects.
Welcome to a day in my sculpting side of life :-)
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This point in the process is where i have the basic form carved out making it likely to be the last photo for a
while. The next stage on this piece is refining the forms you see in the stone above, tedious sort of stuff much
dependent on the lighting of the moment, what can look good in the morning can look real bad in the evening
light......
One of the challenges with this stone is how the basic matrix of stone has these small, angled, chips of
something very much harder that can turn up anywhere, so one often ends up with a high point in the softer
material effectively destroying a nice curve if the lighting is wrong.......... anyway it’s all to boring to
photograph.
When everything is shaped to suit, then it’s draw in the detail and sculpt to finish. An interesting point is that
when it is finished the final work may or may not be anything to do with the above blurb i regaled you with
about what and why i did what i did.
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So i have cleaned up the overall sculpture a bit, and added some ripple/water/sand?? forms behind the centre
piece.
Now it’s the phase where i start adding some detail to bring everything together, anchor it into a more cohesive
unit. A name for the sculpture presented itself while i was sanding thanks to a responder in the PCLinuxOS forum
and has refined a thought or two as to the direction of detail for part of the sculpture. Sorry no hints yet.
Currently i am engaged in sculpting the detail outlined in pencil, it’s a bit fiddly and might take a while but a
good space to meditate within full attention in the moment, as they say practice makes perfect........ and if
something is perfect it is effectively dead :-) The pattern is one that i sometimes use to represent
atmosphere/aether......... and similar. There is no particular background to the pattern other than i decided on
it back in the bone carving days when i carved a particular whales tooth that i have been known to wear from
time to time.
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So here is a closer view of creating the details and some of the, not exactly appropriate tools i am using for this
aspect of the work. Inappropriate because..... the steel is not tough enough and blunts quickly. i have an
ancient hand grinder nearby to quickly whip up an edge as things blunt out. The small wooden handled ones are
high carbon (supposedly) craft tools that are thin enough in the blade that sharpness is not so much of an issue
and one doesn’t feel so bad about abusing tools in inappropriate ways on materials they were never designed for.
Below is the view i see as i work.
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In the last stages now, everything with regards to the design is finalized and now it’s a case of refining things up as
much as i can.
I had originally hoped to do some more detailed work on the sculpture but the stone is not of a quality to support
what i had planned. This is probably a good thing because i can now see it’s finished with respect to subject
matter and it’s feel.
I will be fiddling with it for some time yet, then it’s seal the stone and find a very large fence post to mount it out
in the Fence Post Gallery at Mahara Sculpture Park and Pottery
Click photos for bigger version
So here it is out in the garden
This is another work with that i am using to attempt an explanation of how i work while sculpting a new sculpture.
