Urban Flowers - and other lessons learned

I built an arbor for a commercial plant operation this last summer. It took me longer than I expected because I had to build it twice. It isn’t the first time I have had to do something twice – or more – when it met neither client’s aspirations nor mine. In almost every case the metal generally can and is repurposed into something else. And generally it is a progressive lesson or learning experience. Like care-giving, you have to live it to know there will be progressive learning and lessons twice or more learned. Perhaps as General Patton (as played by George C. Scott) allegedly said “I don’t like to pay for the same real estate twice”, lessons sometimes are expensive.

In this case I am repurposing a couple thousand bucks worth of steel tubing. For the project I chose steel tubing rather than pipe for strength and weight considerations. I envisioned tree boughs linking through the rings and the tree becoming guided sculpture and the sculpture/arbor becoming one with the trees. The client saw the rings and looked at me in horror. Apparently I didn’t think about the rings cutting off and chocking the tree limbs. But once again, like care-giving, I’d set aside patience, jumping right in before considering the consequences. An arbor requires patience. Wishing a tree forward will not make it grow any faster. I went out and visited the installation last week and saw that the tree wasn’t cooperating and growing at a rate that would engage the arbor anytime soon. The two remain separated like uneasy relatives or in-laws on holidays. It will take a long time for the trees to become one with the arbor and so patience, nurturing, and limb training will be the point of the study for the next several years.

I get to reset my expectations…sound familiar?

Meanwhile the original arbor, now reduced to pieces by metal cutting wheels, starts a new life as a “skeletal” frame for a full-scale (very large) creature on which I will report appropriate progress. And the limbs and rings, they quite by accident became an “urban flower”.

Caregiving and Shipbuilding

I had some time this morning to indulge in what I love – making metal art. Today was ‘blacksmithing” a large section of metal cut from a pipe. The piece of pipe was originally intended for the giant fish that went to the desert. The plans changed and the pipe would up sidelined into art supplies. It is 3/8^th’s inch thick mild steel. Radiuses intended to be a pipe rather than a set of horns, I had to both use the direction of the curve and work backwards away from the curve. The primary reason was I already had the material; the second reason was it saved me at least one set of heated curves.

Heating and bending metal of this thickness takes some muscle – and a lot of acetylene. It has to be red hot then carefully coaxed into position. It takes a lot of patience. Some time ago I watched a documentary about Korean shipbuilders. They were bending very thick metal into the bow pieces for a large transport ship. The metal was almost two inches thick and it took two guys to do each piece. They had a huge acetylene torch and a water hose. The torch was to heat the metal and the hose was to cool it. They coaxed the metal very slowly into the large bow shapes of the ship. Obviously they didn’t use this method to build the whole ship - only the bow pieces. Those pieces needed to be very strong. They had to bend the thick sheets into shapes and they had 1/8^th to 1/16^th of tolerance for the finished part. The finished pieces looked a lot like Richard Serra sculpture. They weighed thousands of pounds.

When asked about the range of tolerance they workers wanted, the response was “we want it to be exact”. The lead guy said 1/32^nd off was too much. What does it take to do this – “patience, discipline and a lot of time”. My process today was slow and deliberate. I ran out of 0² before I could finish the part but I had enough time to get it to a point that looked sort of like a finished piece. I was very patient. Coaxing a brain-injured person back requires patience. Sometimes I show it other times not so much. Thinking about those Korean guys gave me pause. They said they loved what they were doing. I feel the same when care giving is going well and we are making progress. Much like getting a piece of art just right, getting my survivor feeling good and good about herself takes discipline and patience. In art there is a lot of allowance for tolerances. Perhaps in care giving that is also the case.

I enjoyed bending the metal today. It was very satisfying.