nest-sculpture

Stolen Art No.6 Nest, an interactive wall sculpture.

The Art piece was stolen from Shurgard Maastricht Noord whilst in their safe area.

I basically thought this entire art project was a failure.

It lacked direction, and it actually turned into several kind of independent mini projects stuck in on place, with a tenuous link to all the other mini projects.

If anything could be called successful, then it is some new techniques that I expanded on.

Even though I didn't think this project worked very well I am still fucking salty that it was stolen.

Not for the money, but for the time and labor.

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I mess around with a basic shape.

I sort of drew some stylistic wings and I cut out the first part of the body out of 1 mm brass sheet.

Then I soldered some stripping on either side .

Then I bent some 1 mm brass and started forming the body.

Forming the bottom.

I solder everything on my bench.
I make my own solder, which even though it is not jewellery solder, works very well.
Sort of in the easy range. 30 grams fine silver. 9 grams of copper. 7 grams of zinc.

Cut out the cardboard templates. Four of them, but eventually I went for three.

Then I formed the head and the front of the face.

The wings are screwed on through the angle brass.

Like I said three wings.
I cut some titanium and inlayed it into the 2 mm deep brass frame I had made.

Then the tail.
It eventually had 5 mm peridot, amethyst, citrine, topaz, garnet, aqua gemstones at in tubes at the ends.

Tail filed to a taper.

I made a titanium bib for the top of the chest. It will be heat blued later.

I positioned the tail 'feathers' like I liked them and the sacrificed a hose clamp to hold them in place while I soldered everything together.

For the necklace I made a strip of square collets and set some 5 mm stones in it.

I made it out of a solid piece.

And just because I can and I thought it would look classy, I rhodium plated it.

I also made a titanium beak.

Then I made some titanium feathers.
I will do a separate Hidi on how to make them.
I blued these just to see what it would look like.

I thought they looked quite cool so I made more to cover the bird.

I also made a band of stones at the top of the feathers.

Here is the second tier of feathers and also the second gem stone band being made.

I scrapped the first bottom set of feathers and made some long ones.

Then I heat blued them all just to see what it would look like.

I made and set a third bracelet of gemstones for the long feathers.

I made a silver collet to hold the eye. There is a 2 mm screw that holds it into place.

Then I cut a 15 mm amethyst. After it was faceted, I drilled a hole into it.
I cut and set a 3 mm cabochon garnet into the center.

So now I was moving towards starting the actual frame.
I attach everything onto a sheet of galvanized steel.

Here was the basic design, with which I never was really happy with.

I messed around with the actual nest for sooo long. This was the first piece of shit I made.

Fucking directionless.

I made six pieces of failure before I started on the seventh one that eventually became the final one.

Working on the bottom and also the titanium birds.

Slowly stumbling forward.

All the components.

Slowly, the nest was crawling out of the ocean and onto land.

I made some gem nuts and then started on some flowers for the four pillars.

I turned some new pillars for the nest and then made some silver collars to set some garnets in.

Some more silver flowers inside the brass flowers.

I eventually decided on using just two layers of flower. Smaller ones in the front.

Eight flowers held in place with some silver blue topaz gem nuts.

Setting the nest posts with garnets.

The lid of the nest had a hinged lid, so I had to make a catch for it.
So I cut a stylistic bird head and neck for it. Out of some real scrap brass.
Just because it was so fucked.

I make my life difficult for no reason, sometimes.

Anyway, it came out alright.
I set a 3 mm Sandawana emerald in a silver tube into it.

Testing it out.

Just a description picture.

Working on the 'click' feel.

Post and flower from the side.

My plan was to make a stylized flower that would open for the humming bird and then contain a precious piece of jewellery that the owner of this piece would own.
Making something like that is quite another thing, how ever.
My first dead end alley attempt are the following pictures.
First I drew out a leaf, which I was going to pilque à jour enamel it.
I am quite familiar with the technique.

This was my plan. I first only made one to see.

Then some more, pierced out of silver.

I back the leaf with copper foil.

Then I pack it with different enamels and torch fire it.
It lies on a piece of steel, to distribute the heat evenly.

Normally, it will need a second packing and a second firing.

From the beginning, I didn't like the overall look.

At this stage I realized I was on the wrong road. It looked to tacky, and the plique à jour was to big. So scrapped it.

Design number two was an opening flower.
I saw potential in this.

Basically this would be the shape, with hinges and stuff.

So I made long hinges that went the whole length if the 'petals'.

So I made long hinges that went the whole length if the 'petals'

Hinges disassembled and cleaned up.

I liked the flatness of the flower, because that gave me lots of space to mount things and also to mount the thing to the background.
This would have been a significant problem with the original enameled flower.

So this would be the flower unfolded.

This was the side of the flower that went onto the galvanized steel background.

I made some triangular tips at the bottom of the petals so that when the flower is closed, it would close up around the connecting 'stalk?'

Like this. So this was the flower 'chassis' more or less complete.

Now I needed to weld up the frame.
I make my frames with a key hole slot in the back, so the sculpture can be removed easily, or tightened down so it cannot be removed.

I put some black paper to imitate the colour and I started to mess around with composition and size and stuff.

I went back to the nest and made a frame support for it.
I eventually didn't use the copper strips shown in the picture.

Again, composition.

Some leaves and a spiders web that I would use eventually.

More composition.

More final elements added. I pierce the web out of 0.7 mm silver plate.

The leaves with an unfinished titanium background.

Now I opened the door to enameling alley.
I have a more complete Hidi ( How I do it) here

Same as the petals for the first flower, except that this is called cloisonné enamel.
I pack fine gold first and the clear enamel over that.

One of the humming birds ready for firing.

At the wing tips and in the middle of the tail are little loops through which rivets will go to hold it in place.

I made various different humming birds.

I also experimented with various different backgrounds.
Copper is nice like that. Because it is so reactive it allows for reactions to many different colours and chemicals.
This color, for instance, is ammonia based.

This was a preview for all the enameled humming birds.

These were the enamel colors I used. The enamels are from Thompson.
No affiliation.

Some close ups follow.

With a flower. These are all abut 20 to 30 mm in size.

I mostly went for a blue based background.

So now I set about designing the inside of the flower.
I wanted something that hid the ring in the inside the flower when it was closed, and then exposes it when it opened. First some cardboard templates.

These would be the stamens that hide the treasure.

Turned into metal, then.

Testing the overall look.

Then I made a template for the titanium decoration inside the flower.

I made a titanium thingi for all of the stamen.

Back to the frame. Just finishing it off.

Some of the screw tops that I made. There were a lot more to hold everything together.

Doing the 'ol composition dance again.
Only this time it was for real, as in drilling holes.

So the flower became my reference point for the rest of the sculpture.

I had to design some sort of pull and push to lock mechanism that allowed one to open and close the flower when the 'treasure' had to be taken out.

So this would be open, then.

So basically, this catch slides out and releases the flower petals.

Pull the lever back, and the flower falls open.

Now came the time to polish everything.

The Nest.

Eventually, I thought it came out quite nice.

I made a lot of gem nuts for this piece.

The poor naked bird.

This was the final composition.

Testing the flower with the blued titanium and gem nuts.

Testing the bird.

Then I gilded the inside of the frame with gold foil.

It looked quite nice in the end.

These were made to close the ends of the frame up.

The following are just final boutique pictures.

Ditto

Top view of the nest.
I never actually finished the inside of the nest. I ran into project fatigue where I was so tired of working on it that I wanted a month or two doing other thing, before getting down to design an appropriate jewel for Nest.

If you look carefully, you can see the clip where the titanium hummingbird ring mentioned on the front page would go with the flower closed. You can see how it was made here.

I put this photograph up because I like it, no other reason.

I think the face sucked, but like I said, project fatigue.

I used an inordinate amount of gemstones for this project.
I will never make another wall project, because in the three years that it hung in my shop in Dusseldorf in Germany, not ONE person ever noticed it. Not even to tell me it sucked, which Germans do very quickly on about just everything.

The spiders web.
Check the two jump rings near the center of the web.
That is where the titanium spider lived.

Made of blued titanium, gold, emeralds, diamonds rubies .
I cut a special red tourmaline for the thorax.

In the web.

It actually looked very eye catching when it was worn as a brooch.

Even though I didn't think this project worked very well, I am still fucking salty that it was stolen. Not for the money, but for the time and labor, which was well over 400 hours.