See a penny, pick it up...

Strange Cargo asked me to design a 'recycling device' for lucky pennies to be fixed under the bridge at Folkestone Central railway station as part of their "The Luckiest Place on Earth" art piece for Folkestone Triennial. Excitingly, it was to be 3d printed in titanium!

I had a choice of making it in plaster of Paris and then sending it to them to be scanned for printing, or getting it built up in CAD by a third party and doing it using the computer. Because of the repeating elements, I decided it would be better to do it using digital technology, and so I worked with another company to realise it in 3d.

It was a weird process. Apart from the 2d layout above, it was all in my head, and I was having to try and explain to someone else what shape it should be, and what measurements. So I decided the easiest thing to do would be to send them sketches of each component and we could discuss them as they were extruded on the computer...

 

It was a complicated process, but it worked! In the end, Renishaw printed the prototype and it looked not far off the original. Some things we'd changed because of tolerances of the material or the printing process.

 

 It's now installed at the Station and every time I pass it there are pennies in the holders, so people are clearly using it all the time! 

When in Rome…

When I was about 25 I was taught to cut letters in stone by my grandfather, Stephen Rickard, who had learnt at the Royal Academy in the 1930s and 40s. It's a very satisfying medium - the piece in the foreground was my first attempt, and it was on a bit of broken York stone (hence the choice of word). The alphabet behind is on a slab of Portland. There's something temptingly mischievous about having the ability to "set things in stone"!

Where the hart is

I made this hart's head for Strange Cargo, working in Aveley Primary School, Essex. The head was cast in plaster, and then moulded in papier mache to create a carnival costume that can be worn on the head.

Big artist!

OK, so here's one of my weirder jobs. Make Tracey Emin's head, but make it BIG! The head was made for a project by Strange Cargo for the town of Margate, as a carnival costume.

I made the head in clay. It was then cast in plaster, and the head for the costume was made from papier maché, which I then painted. Weird but fun!