The Vessel | Part 2
Transcript
I've certainly gotten to know my welder really well. We spent 4 months together and Paul was always on the inside of the object and I was on the outside holding things in place; and both of us grimacing as we stretched our arms a little further than we'd ever anticipated having to do. But at the end of those 4 months we had over 11,000 welds and 4 kilometers of rod forming this large vessel.
We built the piece in 4 sections. The bottom two-thirds, which in a sense looks like a large vase was the first part that we completed. After that we built the top third which included the spout. Once these sections were finished, and the handle was basically built from an arc and a set of concentric ellipses - if you look closely you'll see how the rods are sitting on sprocketed ellipses that run through that handle - we then took all 4 sections out of our fabrication shop and spent several sunny days putting the piece together. Once that was done the most difficult part was to determine whether in fact the handle was going to fit into these pre-ordained sizes that we had come up with using our computer modeling. And of course we were off by about 3.3 centimeters. So a little hole had to be cut and the handle was re-positioned and sure enough everything fit together. It was at this moment, a really exciting moment, where I was able to create all the splaying rods. If you look at the bottom of the handle or the top you'll see a number of rods, which are emanating from that elliptical handle out onto the body of the piece. And this was a really fun thing to do. It was at this point that I could leave behind all of my preconceived calculations and all the numbers that we had gone over in our minds and slowly link one rod to another rod on the body of the piece. And there are actually 84 rods around the bottom and another 84 around the top of the handle, and on-by-one we positioned them, created the arcs and then welded them in place.
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