Rage Against The Night: test picket #1
/You will recall that a couple of weekends ago I joined my fellow Large Art Burn [LAB] artists in harvesting 6,000 linear feet of sapling trunks up at Bouckaert Farms in Chattahoochee Hills, where we stage Alchemy every fall. (My piece is called Rage Against The Night; the theme of the burn is Lighting the Void.) This harvested timber becomes the raw material for constructing the eight chosen LAB pieces.
I brought eight of the four-foot-long pieces home with me so I could experiment with the basic premise that if I macraméd them together with simple sisal rope, they’d form a picket sturdy enough to maintain an arch.
The results were semi-conclusive: Yes, the macramé idea should work, with some improvisation.
The simple knot between each sapling is enough to hold them together in a fairly sturdy fashion, though I think I will have to take extra care to make the knots super-tight.
Eight saplings were not enough to thoroughly test the picket’s ability to sustain an arch, but I think it will work.
It is probable that we will have to install some cross-struts to help maintain the arch, especially when burners start driving wooden wedges in between the saplings. More work is required.
Another problem I foresee is that the design shows each segment flaring from one end to the other, and the next segment nesting inside the flared end.
For that to happen, though, the saplings would have to narrow significantly from their base to their end, thereby making each picket a wedge shape. This is not the case: the saplings are fairly uniform in their thickness.
I think I can fix that by using half-pieces at the wide end and pulling the “thin” ends together. (see image to the right) More work is required.
And of course very few of the sapling pieces are perfectly straight, which contributes to the instability of the architecture. I’m sure if I stop thinking about it my brain will come up with a perfectly cromulent solution for dealing with crooked timber.
A reminder that Lacuna Group will host an information session about William Blake’s Inn on Sunday, August 25, 2:00–4:00 p.m., at Southern Arc Dance. We will run through the music, discuss the collaborative approach we intend to use to design the show, and answer questions about the whole shebang.
