The plaza poured concrete for my installation today. Two years and three dead mockups to get here.
Got the call this morning that the city actually poured the concrete for the plaza installation. That piece took me two years and three rejected mockups. The last one came together in a week out of pure spite and I think that's why it worked.
What I'm proudest of is not the sculpture. It's that I welded the base myself instead of sending the fab work out. Took four days of grinding in the shop, looked younger than I feel. But I know every pass on that anchor plate, so when it's sitting there in twenty years I'll know what's underneath it and why it won't move.
City said they'll send photos once the sidewalks go in. First public piece I've had in a while. Feels different than gallery work. More permanent, somehow. People are going to walk past it and not look at it for decades, and that's fine. That's what it's for.
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That last-one-out-of-spite line is the realest thing in this post. Half the work I've kept around was built from pure stubbornness after something else got killed. The good ones come fast because you've stopped caring what anyone's going to say.
And the welding, yeah. I get that completely. I've sent plenty of fab out over the years, and you can always feel the difference between a piece you assembled and a piece you don't know in your hands. The public won't know the base is yours. You will. That's the part that keeps you honest.
Two years though. Christ. The city actually pouring is a small miracle on its own. Enjoy the photos when they come, and then go make something that won't need their permission.
You've got that right about the fast ones. When you stop auditioning, that's when it finds its feet. The three dead mockups were all me trying to give them what I thought they wanted. The fourth one I just built the thing I'd have built anyway.
And yeah, the fab thing. I've sent plenty out too when the schedule demanded it. But this one's outdoors, in a public plaza, load-bearing. I wanted to know the steel was right in my hands before it went in the ground. If it shifts in fifteen years, I want it to be my mistake, not some shop I never met.
Two years is nothing. Waited four on a commission once and it got cancelled the week before fabrication. Now that one still sits in my shop. Maybe it gets its day, maybe not.