"Perhaps if you made some smaller pieces, then I could afford to buy one of your beautiful works." To the best of my recollection , this is a comment that my friend Liz, made at my Bitfactory Gallery showing. She was also a dancer/choreographer with Spoke 'n Motion Dance Company with dance moves as sinuous and sensuous any dancer I've ever seen.
This was the impetus to explore 'motion' in a small scale sculpture. I began by looking for abstracted drawings or graphics of dance to help guide me on the Internet. I found some almost calligraphy like; very simple, stylized brush strokes that really captured the essential motion of dance.
I cut these images out of paper and then roughly traced them onto copper, both elongating and enlarging the shapes. It's all very intuitive, as I gauge success when it both looks and feels right to me. The process of cutting out the thin copper sheets with tin snips was an intriguing process as cutting transformed the copper into sensual curves that conveyed motion.
I was also intrigued with the idea of marrying a medium called poly-clay to the copper. Besides sticking, this fantastic, magical stuff hardens in about four hours to a very solid body, that feels like a a cross between stone and clay. Working with it is a bit tricky, as it is sticky and tends to easily slump, but the copper worked beautifully as a kind of armature for it.
After I created the individual forms, I then was led to patina only one side of each 'dancer' with a vivid blue patina and contrasted it with the shinny copper on the other side. As usual, the patina process is always magical as it transforms the metal. The only glitch was that it also stained the bright side, which I thought I had sealed and thereby protected. I ended up going back and re-sanding and polishing it to get it back to the shinny copper look.
The last step was drilling the stone slab that I was going to mount the pieces on and gluing the pieces into place. I was not sure what it would actually look like until this final step. I looked at it... It conveyed sinuous, graceful motion frozen in an instant of time. That's dance, one instataneous movement rapidly following another!