This is part of an occasional series about objects that live in my studio.

This is Watershed, West Memphis, Arkansas.  This was a study model, so the real thing didn’t come out like this at all.  Well, it’s a little bit like this, but this is kind of a study of how it could have been.

I love making scale models.  I have to figure it out, you know? This is all made from chipboard and museum board, and figuring out how to make it look weathered, and getting the scale right–I really enjoy that.  And it changes too. It’s a study model. So it’s–it’s not a presentation model, meaning it changes, I experiment on it.

It’s got thread and sequins on it, which in reality became steel cable and aluminum tubes.  And the base changed too. In this model, the cables shroud the whole thing. But there were complications that came up with that.  And issues of visibility too. In the end I ended up hanging everything off of the catwalk and brought that circle down to the ground.

But this is a much more involved situation down here as far as seating and making a space. And I didn’t like how it kind of engulfed the area.  There is seating in the actual one, and you can go inside it. It’s the same thing essentially except that it’s just the circle. And there’s still four ways in, and all the cables come down to the seating, so it’s combined.  But what it did is it brought that circle right down to the ground. The same circle, the catwalk, is projected down to the ground. And the cables connecting them let you see that cylinder, and I like that. I also like that it made the cables denser, and I was concerned about seeing those cables.

So in the end, the cables went straight down, which was complicated, because as you can see, the legs taper, so the circle is inside.  But up above it’s outside. So that’s not a small detail. That means there’s interference from the braces, which was tricky.  But… you gotta keep it interesting!

It was also interesting too because no drawings of this thing existed.  So nobody knew actually how tall it was, or how wide, or anything. So I went out there and measured what I could on the ground, and then I hired a civil engineer with a drone to go, and a drone took photos all the way up so I could guess where different things were.  And then I had a point scan done to make a 3-dimensional model. It’s made up of just billions of points in space.

And it’s kind of a big deal, not just to make an accurate model, but I had to figure out how much cable to buy and whether it was going to be enough, and what the length from top to bottom was going to be.  Because each one of those cables had to be cut and assembled ahead of time–it’s not like somebody had scissors–every single one had to be pre-made, 1200 lengths of cable. There’s $66,000 worth of cable. So I wanted it to be right.  It caused some sleepless nights.!

studio, watershed