No autobiographical sculpture would be complete without Our Cat. Perhaps because he is a King Cat, he got his own pole.
A cat? A pole? Of course he is climbing it. From his look I can’t quite tell if he is having fun or trying to figure out how he got there and how he gets back down.
It took me a few tries to figure out how to wrap his wooden tail around the pole.
We wanted to put some of my scrap people in the garden as sculpture, rather than just on the edges of the garden on tables and benches. To be seen they would need to be a little bigger and elevated above the plants. I decided to use some of my larger scrap 2×4’s and raise them up above the plants on a pole. I thought it would be fun to make the pole part of the design and not just nail the people to it.
After some doodling around, the most important part of any design process, I decided on an autobiographical sculpture; Lisa and me, a gardener and and a handy person, hanging on to the pole. In a fun bit of symbolism, the pole needs both of us to stay balanced.
Lisa found an enormous philodendron that was spilling out of its pot. It needed to be raised up off the ground to protect the leaves and to display it in all its glory.
I had previously designed a plant stand for a smaller, lighter weight plant. This new phil stand needed to be taller and stronger. After trying all sorts of ideas, I settled on two designs. One was an enlarged version of my previous stand. The second arranged the horizontal supports and legs into a pinwheel. I made a model to present them. (top figure) We picked the pinwheel.