Detritusphere

From the comments in my earlier posts, detailing the work-in-progress stages of Detritusphere, I became aware that a few people thought that the sculpture was roughly football-sized. So I’ve taken some photos of the now completed Detritusphere with myself in shot, for scale. As I’m sure you can tell, I’m one of those annoying idiots who finds it difficult not pulling faces in front of a camera. I did manage to hold it together for a couple of shots, but that proved to be the limit of my self-control.

'Detritusphere' sculpture & artist Wayne Chisnall

 

As previously stated, in earlier Detritusphere progress reports, the sculpture is made up of small pieces of flat metal plates that I’ve mostly either found on the roadside or dug up from Victorian rubbish dumps that I discovered in the woods of Shropshire. Some of the metal pieces used in the final half of Detritusphere’s construction came from a local scrap metal dealer, James Rollason. Jim very kindly allowed me to collect the pieces that I needed from his scrap yard, a veritable wonderland of interesting shapes and textures.

 

'Detritusphere' sculpture, artist Wayne Chisnall

I constructed the sphere by first beating the plates into the correct curvature, then overlapping them and drilling small holes through the overlapped sections, through which I thread handmade metal staples. Once the two legs of each staple are threaded through the holes, I twist them tightly together to secure the plates in place. For the final plate in the piece’s construction I used a pop-rivet gun to fix it in place as I was obviously unable to reach inside (once the plate had been set in place) and twist any staple legs together.

 

'Detritusphere' sculpture & artist Wayne Chisnall

Getting slightly off topic, this reminds me of a terrible story I once heard about horrific historical shipbuilding practices. Hopefully, the story I heard was pure urban myth, but it either way it goes roughly like this. At some point in the early or mid-20^th Century, when old ships had come to the end of their lives and were being dismantled in the ship breaking yards, people started discovering children’s skeletons inside the hulls. The theory I heard proposed was that as it required two people to rivet ships’ metal plates together (one on each side of the plates), when it came to riveting the final plate in place the ship builders would find a naïve child (presumably a child off the streets or an orphan taken on as a disposable apprentice) and get them to do the job on the inside, probably explaining that they would get them out after the job was completed through some fictitious hatch. As I said, hopefully this story wasn’t true, and thinking about it, it does sound like it the kind of short story that I could have read in one of the many Pan books of Horror Stories that I avariciously consumed as a child.

'Detritusphere', scrap metal sculpture, artist Wayne Chisnall