Here are the steps of how I created a
sculpture of the Barney & Smith Train Car Factory as part of my commission
to create six sculptures for the ReImagining Works project of the Dayton Metro Library.
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| Barney & Smith Train Car Factory - Darren Kall, Property of Dayton Metro Library |
First a review of the commission: The sculpture is cutout sheet aluminum approximately 33in H, 45in W, .25in D. The sculptures are integrated into the fence of the new reading terrace of the Electra C. Doren Branch Library. Each panel depicts a different Old North Dayton landmark.
The Barney &
Smith Car Factory was an industrial cornerstone of Old North Dayton that was
destroyed in the Great Dayton Flood of 1913. Many immigrant families of Old
North Dayton worked at the factory. The factory was much larger than the
section I depicted. I used historic photos of the factory as my source for details and subject inspiration.
As part of the ReImagining Works project the community chose Charles Sheeler's Stacks in Celebration painting from the permanent collection of the Dayton Art Institute as the inspiration for this project. In my sculpture train parts and partial assemblies sit in the
open “street” between factory buildings and smoke stacks jut into the sky much
like Charles Sheeler’s subjects in Stacks in Celebration. And I interpreted Sheeler's fractured cubist sky with my sky sections of lines of different thicknesses.
I started with pencil sketches where I decided the layout of objects, then the fracture lines of the sky, and finally what of four bar thicknesses I'll use for the"shades" of sky in each segment.
I worked out all the cutouts at this stage. Since all parts of the black had to be attached in the final piece I had to think through each line before I did any cutting.
Of the six sculptures this was the most complicated visually since there were so many small parts and separate objects that had to be distinguished from each other.
The cleaned and scanned version of the final artwork.
I used Ultra Aluminum as my fabricator for cutting the sheet metal. This is a copy of the instructional guideline that I gave Ultra Aluminum for the placement of the support lines, and the placement of my signature. This was accompanied with a written description of how I wanted the sculpture cut.
The CAD expert at Ultra Aluminum took the scan of my original and fed it through a transformation program that converted it to a CAD drawing. Then they manually adjusted where the program didn't interpret my original correctly. The CAD expert then added the support lines. The CAD expert and I traded the CAD drawings back and forth until I was ready to sign off on the final version.
The CAD expert then programed the cutting path that directed the automated water jet cutter as it moved across the sheet aluminum cutting out each hole in the sculpture.
After this came a lot of hand grinding to remove burrs on the cut edges, more grinding to create the surface effect, and clear powder coating to surface the piece before it was ready for assembly and installation. But more about that part of theprocess in other posts.
After this came a lot of hand grinding to remove burrs on the cut edges, more grinding to create the surface effect, and clear powder coating to surface the piece before it was ready for assembly and installation. But more about that part of theprocess in other posts.
