Intermediate Sculpture
Spring 2023
This class was unexpectedly one of my favorites I have taken at Santa Clara. The first day of class Professor Carrington showed us the options we had for our projects - and for some reason welding stuck with me. Overall, I never thought I could say “I have to go work on my welding project” but Im so glad I had to opportunity to!
Sneak peek!
My First Welding . Project
no joke I had never welded before these pictures
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For this project I originally wanted to do something with flowers - when sketching out the original design I realized that the bends I imagined would not be possible with thicker wire. I then changed my design, which you can see the process of below, and created a four-petal-esq ‘unit’. After I finished the first ‘unit’ I then had to go back and make that same shape 6 times for them to hold in a round finished structure. I started by cutting the segments of wire, bending them into arcs, welding two arcs together, bending the ‘petal’, welding four petals together to create a unit, and then welding and assembling the final spherical-shaped structure.
Final Project
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Final Project ---
Step 1:
Bend and cut wire into petal shapes (not shown sorry) then I welded them in pairs to create the petal shape. In total I made around 47 of these individual pieces.
Step 2:
Once I had welded all of the large petals together, I decided that I wanted to clean up the larger-scale version of my previous project by sanding down the rough joints on the ends of the petals. You can see the difference in the pictures on either side here.
Step 3:
After the petals were formed, I put them back through the large giant metal circular press machine I can’t remember the name of. But now they are ready to be assembled into the units
Step 4:
Here, I used magnets to stabilize the units together before I welded them. The metal + wire contact on the table allows for the machine to weld the wire. To the left you can see some of the finished units.
Step 5:
When all the units were done, I lifted a piece of metal to act as the backboard to hold the units as I welded them into the final piece. This took a lot of effort because the larger units are more susceptible to bending.
