Project updates: GALAXY, Labyrinth, L'ism for Kids

GALAXY

You will recall that I finished bending wire into the 230 stands required to elevate the 196 rings of GALAXY above the ground. However, there was one step still to go: tagging each bundle with a colored tape for immediate identification (7/8/9 stands).

The idea stemmed from the solution I came up with for the bundles of rings. There are seven zones, and each zone has four boxes with seven plugs for rings. My thought was to group the rings ahead of time and tie them with twill tape corresponding to the colors of the spectrum so that installation time is reduced. All we have to do is lay out the spine of the piece, drop the recipe cards on each box, and then trundle our tote around and drop the corresponding bundles of loops onto the cards. No sorting necessary!

The same principle applies to the stands. (I’ve added the number of stands required to each recipe card.)

So here’s what I found on Amazon:

Cool, huh? So with the stands, I chose white, gray, and brown for the bundles of 7, 8, and 9 respectively. (There’s only one bundle of 7.)

In the labyrinth

Thirty-two days until the Tour of Homes benefiting the Children’s Museum at the other end of the street, and here we are.

My lawnmower is in the shop, and the shop owner has Covid/pneumonia. (I’m borrowing my neighbor’s mower until mine is fixed; they’re the ones who roped me into this gig in the first place so it’s only fair.)

The paving stones have had a distressing tendency over the past thirteen years to sink into the ground. I am raising the worst of them by prying them up, installing a bed of river pebbles, and replacing them.

It’s tedious, and worse, impermanent: I’ve done this twice before. And even worse: the reinstalled stones look so much better than the other ones that I may be forced to do all three tons of stone. And then I will have to reseed the entire labyrinth just so it will look “pretty” to the Tourists.

HOWEVER, the most fun thing I’ve done in the labyrinth is to install the galvanized tin two-faced head that my Lovely First Wife gave me.

I have a spot that I have to clean up before the Tour where I’ve dumped the remains of several projects, and they’re kind of big: dead steel poles that I had to replace in my tent, PVC pipe used to bolster a cheap canopy at the burn, a wooden pallet that was to have been the base of another burn art project, and the rotted redwood slats that I replaced on the garden glider. The PVC will go to the street, I’ll cut up the pallet to burn as a mini-effigy for the Equinox (stay tuned), and I decided to use the redwood slats for a stand.

First, leftover wire from GALAXY inserted into a slat to help hold up the head.

Then drive one of the tent poles into the ground…

…enclose it with other slats…

…do a little GESTALT/SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION…

…and finish up with a few architectural embellishments.

And done.

If I may pause for a Lichtenbergian lesson here, I think it’s important to recognize that I started this project with only the idea that I needed to clean up/remove the redwood slats and I needed to get the tin head off the table and onto a display — and then I just improvised from there. I did not have a plan. The whole thing was ABORTIVE ATTEMPT > GESTALT > SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION from beginning to end.

Lichtenbergianism for Kids

I’m still inviting anyone who’s interested in reading over a proof copy of Lichtenbergianism for Kids to email me. I’ll send you the first of six very short PDFs to peruse and give me your thoughts, after which I’ll send the next. I’d love to have some readers between the ages of 12 and 17, so if you have one of those, hook me up.