Weekend Work

Several years ago, we were at a street art fair and Annie fell in love with the sculptures of Andrew Carson. we talked about buying one for years… it wasn’t until recently that actually making the purchase became realistic.

The sculpture is custom made (variations on a design, each one is slightly different) and is made of brass, hand-blown glass, steel, copper, etc. There are 13 different pivot points on the thing, it’s really much more like a cross between a mechanical bird and a weather-vane than anything else, and when the breeze is blowing it spins and twirls, so still photos don’t do it justice. Right now it’s bastard hot and the air is still; I’m waiting for a windy day; maybe I can get a video of it in motion with my cellphone. It doesn’t make any sound (at least none that I can hear); it just spins.

I just spent a part of yesterday and part of today installing it.  The artist shipped it out in a series of big boxes that arrived via UPS — the curvy stand was wrapped from top to bottom in packing material and the rest was disassembled and packed in boxes.  I sunk a concrete footing about 2 feet deep x 18 inches wide with threaded bolts embedded in it and the stand bolted to that. The rest was fairly easy to put together with an allen wrench and a box wrench — it was 90% assembled, one just had to attatch the wings, the fan, etc.  Actually unpacking it was harder than assembling it. I think the threaded rods on the base poke out too much and may want to eventually cut them down; Annie thinks that the grass will make it a non-issue.

I haven’t measured it, but I am guessing it is about 9 or 10 feet tall from the ground to the little red arrow-thingy at the top.