that bunako thing

Last time was the turn of that juggling thing. Now I’m looking at that bunako thing. Still thinking about this thing.

The Set Up:

I was placed with the wood group in the sculpture department of Joshibi.

I was there for half-a-dozen or so afternoons.

I was shown a few techniques for working with bunako and just sort of left to get on with it.

The Results:

I grappled with it for a bit and started by making a couple of basic bowl shapes. …so, then I had a couple of basic bowls. hmmmm.

I spent ages just staring at them trying to figure out where they could go.

Eventually I focused in on all the holes that had been generated where I hadn’t managed to keep enough tension as I added new strips of wood. That’s right: I had two fairly shoddily made basic bowls!

I decided that I would try and make something of a virtue out of these things that would otherwise be seen as flaws. I started by highlighting each of the holes first with a penciled cross, and then later with drawing pins.

In an effort to try and produce something more sculptural, I then drilled out the holes and made some metal darts to basically point at the holes and shout “MISTAKE HERE!”.

For the second of the bowls, I made bigger darts out of cold-forged steel.

… and that was pretty much all I had time for.

I played around a bit with darts-pointing-in and darts-pointing-out and looked at how that changed the feel of things. My next challenge was trying to get it all back to the UK in one piece.

Back in Blighty I ignored it all for a bit, but then picked it up again and started to think about how I could try and move it forward. Again. This time I realised there were more imperfections that I could highlight. I worked a mixture of graphite and beeswax into the ridges left by my lacklustre sanding so that I was left with intermittent concentric rings around the surface.

[mental note to self: next time don’t use graphite for this – it doesn’t stay put and everything turns a murky grey colour.]

Did It Work?

Yes and no.

The problem is they still look like bowls. They’re bowl-shaped, and they’re bowl-sized. Too domestic and not sculptural enough. I think it has to do with the materials as well.

I talked with people about maybe using synthetic materials for the darts. Brightly-coloured plastic or something. Trying to get away from the strong craft-related association of the wood and the forged steel. Trying to get away from the novelty fruit bowl effect.

In the end I decided that it was the bowlness – the shape – that I wanted to destroy. The (as yet unrealised) solution that I might try one day is to cast some super-large darts: darts so large that they almost completely consume the wooden fabric of the bowl. Darts so large that by the time you have mode the holes large enough to accommodate them, there is hardly any wood left.

Of course, now you lose the 1:1 relationship of darts to mistakes…

On the plus side, I liked the idea that it all came from: find a characteristic of the process and run with it.