Reconstructing tree (and me) / September 14, 2018 by kelly heaton

Studio work in-progress, September 2018.

I’m getting ready to have arthroscopic surgery on my left hip to repair an old injury that is becoming arthritic. Meanwhile, looking at the state of my studio, it appears that I have imposed my own condition on this tree branch —a work in-progress for my latest Electrolier. Some people have commented that my approach is convoluted and I will not argue with that. However, I often find myself undertaking arduous and complex works because a big challenge yields so many little surprises, adaptations, and personal touches that don’t happen when you follow a direct path from concept to object. I am not a “special effects” artist. My art is more about the process of becoming —the struggle to achieve a difficult but worthy goal— than it is about the end result. Of course, I want the end result to be beautiful, but I strive for a beauty that is multi-layered, honest, generous, and full of stories.

Depending upon my recovery process, it may be a few weeks before I can continue with making sculpture. Meanwhile my studio is a good portrayal of my current state of being: a lot happening all at once, incomplete, in need of a good clean-up, and full of promise.

Papercraft tree WIP / September 4, 2018 by kelly heaton

I continue to work on my latest Electrolier sculpture. For this part --an arboreal vignette (and habitat for electric creatures of the Virginian night)-- I designed a sculptural tree in Blender that I unwrapped, print, cut, and folded to make branches out of relatively thin paper. I used this first collection of paper branches to build an underlying structure for my sculpture, like a naked tree. I stabilized it with wood glue and expandable foam. At the moment I am applying a bark layer which I laser cut out of cardboard using the same sequence of branch patterns. Because I am layering identical patterns, and because the real world is imperfect, the bark does not wrap around the circumference of the underlying tree exactly. I fill occasional gaps in the bark by hand, which gives an organic feeling to the machine aesthetic.

Whoever believes that technology makes production easier or faster has not witnessed my painstaking practice to balance artist and computer, nature and machine. For more information on process, please refer to my earlier blog entry: https://www.kellyheatonstudio.com/blog/2018/8/1/modeling-tree-branches

Below are several images of my process thus far. Note that this is the first of two interlocking branches.