Wall Sculpture (2013)

My buddy Kevin is a really smart guy, math smart. He worked for Weta when I lived in New Zealand, his job was programming how hair moves and how trees grow. I was looking through his online portfolio and noticed he had some very cool 2-dimensional renderings from a program he wrote. The renderings looked sort of organic, but sort of computational. I really liked them and asked Kevin if I could turn one into a wall sculpture.

I was doing a lot of fabricating using laser cut steel at the time, so this was the first thing that came to mind. Melissa suggested wooden end cheeks to warm up the design and I devised a way to mount the steel directly into the wood creating a hidden joint. The laser cut steel was powder coated to a colour that Melissa and I spent a lot of time chosing to match the walnut wood.

I took Kevin's design and cropped it to a golden ratio and then decided to mirror it to create a diptych. In hindsight I wonder if I should have left his original alone, although I'm pretty happy with how this turned out and Kevin was happy to see one of his computer programs turned into a physical object.