Head job

Fabricators are among the unsung heroes of the art world. They're like the film crews who climb the mountain first so they can get shots of the heroic mountaineer scaling the peak. We've featured some of these people before but this time we can combine it with an art-at-the-movies twist. 

American Kate Lang was a fabricator and props maker for the Young Hercules franchise of the late 1990s. Among the props she created was an over-scale head of Ares, the character played by Kevin Smith. The head was carved from polystyrene and bronzed for use on the set. Much later the head was discovered by Rohan Wealleans. With a paint job and further modifications it now features in his City Gallery exhibition. 

You can see more of Kate Lang’s work here. If you want to create your own art work from a West Auckland movie prop, you can get a nifty giant hand with torch going for the asking if you rush on over to TradeMe. 

Images: left, the head of Ares as originally created for Young Hercules and right, Rohan Wealleans' transformation at the City Gallery

Stainless reputation

New Plymouth may be out of the way (even for New Zealand) but it has now become a go-to place for art fabrication. The city has been building Len Lye sculptures since the mid-seventies when John Matthews worked with the artist to build the massive Flip and Two Twisters. Since then a number of Lye works have been fabricated by Matthews engineering company for the Len Lye Foundation.

More recently NP has been the source of the 76 highly polished stainless steel balls that make up the 2009 Anish Kapoor sculpture Tall Tree. This work has been around having been shown in the UK and at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The connection between Kapoor (who has also had work fabricated in Auckland) and Global Stainless in New Plymouth came via the internet. Global Stainless has had a web site for over 12 years and it was this site that persuaded Kapoor to order up a sample highly polished stainless steel ball, and then put in an order for a set of 76. 

The secret, according to managing director, Lincoln Raikes, is that “The balls are formed after welding, a novel process that means there is no weld shrinkage - leaving a perfect sphere with no seams and a mirror finish when the process is complete.” The job took five people eight months. When the GS team was done the balls were sent down the road to TP Engineering in Wiri to be assembled on high tensile shafts.

Image: Anish Kapoor's Tall Tree outside the Guggenheim Museum in Balboa. (Thanks A for the head's up)

Pure fabrication

Recently we’ve been spending some time visiting a foundry that specialises in making art works. The owner of the foundry has been through art school and, apart from his expertise with some sort of plaster-like substance, wax and metal (which seem to be the big three of the casting process), he and his team also have the same sort of intuitive approach to materials you see with artists. It’s very impressive.

It reminded us again of the army of makers that contributes to many art works. We’ve already posted on the marble carvers used by artists like Jeff Koons and the Auckland firm that fabricated the gigantic Anish Kapoor on Alan Gibbs' sculpture park The Farm.

Now via a great article in The Paris Review we have discovered Lippincott Inc, fabricators of super-sized sculptures in metal including Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk that exercised us so much when we were in Berlin. Founded in 1966, Lippincott Inc's heyday was in the late sixties and seventies when, in addition to working with Barnett Newman, it fabricated Claes Oldenburg's mega-mitt Standing Mitt with Ball and works by Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana as well as almost 100 others. Lippincott Inc helped change the scale and ambition of contemporary American sculpture. As the article's author Jonathan Lippincott. (yes, he’s the son of the founder) says of Lippincott Inc, "It got bigger, it moved outdoors, it asserted itself as a modern form of public monument."

Images: Lippincott Inc at work installing Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (1969) top and bottom, rolling the metal for Oldenburg’s Standing Mitt and Ball (1973). Photographs from The Paris Review via Jonathan Lippincott Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s