Eclipse

Name – Eclipse

Year – 2009

Material – Cast bronze with mirror polish and black patina finish.

Dims – 450mm H x 270mm W x 125mm D.

Edition – Limited edition of 6.

Eclipse was the very first bronze design I developed and is still to date one of my personal favourites. The form uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine its proportions and is inspired by the Nautilus shell, resulting in a highly fluid and aesthetic sculpture. The look and finish was directly influenced by my admiration for the cast bronze abstracts of modernist sculptors Arp & Brancussi.

One surface is perfectly smooth with a mirror polish, whilst the other has a dark patina and is textured with a series of raised lines that hint at how the sculpture was made. The original ‘pattern’ was created using a metal frame or jig with two sides and shaped to the Fibonacci spiral. A series of holes were drilled in the jig, so string could be stretched and tied from one side to another. Liquid wax was then painted onto one side of the string and gradually built up layer over layer, until a solid surface was achieved. After a considerable amount of work smoothing out the wax, a form was achieved that could then be invested into a ceramic shell and made into bronze using the lost wax process.