Portfolio Piece: Heavy Chair
This chair was a piece for my sculpture foundation class at Hampshire College. Off the bat from hearing that we were going to get to work with steel and concrete, I immediately thought large and intricate. Upon looking at the material costs of my original conceptualization, I found a comfortable compromise and came up with the general idea of using twisted round steel as legs and a concrete seat. I wanted to emphasize the strength of the steel and use the concrete in a way that it wouldn't typically be used, thus I decided to make the seat out of it after opting to create a functional piece. I initially welded the seat armature out of the solid 3/8" rod and liked it's very simplistic form a lot, I even considered changing the direction of my project, but decided if I were to move in that direction that I would want it to be symmetrical to emphasize the simplicity of the design. After getting past this I bent the legs into the organic shapes from twisted round tube and welded them to the armature. Surprisingly enough the most tedious and annoying part of the piece was creating the organic form of the seat out of hardware cloth so that the concrete would have a surface to bind to. The application of the concrete was done all by hand and smoothed using rubber gloves. An enamel clear coat was applied to the steel in the absences of access to a proper paint booth and automotive clear coat due to time constraints.
Medium: Steel, Brytoncrete and hardware cloth.
Fabrication Methods: Bent, MIG/TIG welded, ground/sanded, hand application of concrete.
Approximate Weight:: 75 lbs.
Year: 2010
