LABOR INTENSIVE is Worth It...
And so is experimental.The construction you see at left is a work in progress...and has been for well over a year.What do you do with a fabulously marked vase that has a badly cracked neck and mouth? You cut its head off, I decided, and did just that. Wow...now I had a wonderful semi-hollow rutabaga. I found out things about the vases I have been rescuing from the discard pile from this globe shaped turning. The insides are really rough, and fibrous. The wood is not hard, but that makes it more difficult to carve and the knots of root wood make it complicated carving.What you see at left is what I look at when I wake up in the morning. It stands all stringy and weird on the speakers in a corner of my sleeping room (really not a whole bedroom, but that's another story), and makes me smile. Yes, it's unfinished (like a lot of stuff in my life) but it's so graceful and full of texture and mystery. The bottom is the "rutabaga" that I have hollowed out until it makes a nice sound. Then I smoothed off the top where I had cut off the vase's head, and drilled holes in it. Twelve holes.I then cut the bottom out of a root wood dish and fitted it into the top of my rutabaga.When I was sure it fit well enough, I soaked a piece of leather -- a nice springy one-- and stretched it across the top of the dish, clamping the overlaps to stretch it tight, and set it aside. When dry it made a rather nice drum sound, but there was plenty of stretch left in the leather, so I took an awl and needle and waxed linen thread and made drawstrings to tighten the re-dampened leather even tighter over the top of the dish. This process is more or less still going on! I had no idea how stretchy leather really is!But in the meantime the challenge rose up about connecting the drum head to the globe that was its sound box. Thongs. Yes, it does work, but the number of holes in the leather is not compatable with the twelve holes in the rutabaga. So that is where it is sitting right now, with a cattywompus arrangement that will make a drum sound if I hold it just right.What is that thing on top? I wish I could say it was a sound control flapper or such, but really it's only a mango wood bowl I particularly like, but which looks best when you view it from below. It seems happy up there on my drum head, and so my sculpture du jour for the time being...the three units together...sits there making me smile as I open or close my eyes in bed. Does anyone else like this? Never mind. The learning I have done, and the enjoyment I have had may be the best part of it, and I'm keeping it, and playing it now and then too!
