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More Wawona

Here are a few more pictures of the Wawona sculpture progress.

The inside of the sculpture will be covered with tons of little craters. It first starts off as a flat plane then we drill through the flutes on the front side. The craters are carved up inside of those flutes. These holes will let light in and let people look through the sculpture, and maybe poke a finger, or whatever, through. This piece here has been carved on one side and just the holes so far have been drilled on the other. All the little bits of tape are covering up where there use to be metal in the wood. Eventually we will replace all the metal, but for now they sit empty.

After we pick out the raw blank planks and send them to the UW to be milled into shape we get them back in a very rough carved state. All that the UW is doing is giving us a true edge so the piece will fit together perfectly. The rest of what they do, if they have time, is to give us a rough sense of the shape of the board needs to be between the perfect edges they have milled. Most of the time we have to still carve large chunks of wood away when we get it back. You can see in this picture that they quickly and roughly carved this piece. This section is actually the spine of the sculpture and is made from three planks that were joined together.

Here is more of the spine that we have carved down into shape and have started placing flutes on.

Here is sort of a before and after look at the flutes.

We are almost done carving all the sections for the first layer, here you can see a bunch of them leaning up against the wall.