Case Study Gallery - Rhinoceros

"Girlchild Reflected in Her Mother's Eye" is a 2200 lb sculpture in basalt and bronze, commissioned for a small garden. To begin, I modeled several small maquettes in plasticine. I digitized one of them, using MicroScribe to collect the data, and reconstructed it in Rhino (running under Virtual PC on a Mac). I also modeled the uncut stone in Rhino, from simple measurements taken in the stoneyard the day we selected it, then projected the model of the sculpture into the model of the stone and manipulated their relationship in several ways. Over a long series of adjustments, which would have taken much longer in clay, I adjusted the size and orientation of the sculpture within the model of the stone. I wanted to maximize the visual size and esthetic appeal of the piece without having to remove too much stone. I also wanted to keep as much as possible of the rich chemical patina that the column had acquired over hundreds and thousands of years.

During this planning stage, the form evolved toward greater geometric simplicity until all that remained in the central part of the sculpture was two spheres: a highly reflective, jet-black sphere of stone above, and a bright, highly coloured sphere of bronze below with a shiny, reflective spherical "bite" out of its top. The simplicity emerged because it was easier for a relative newcomer to Rhino to model it that way, and because the basalt column itself was simple in its geometry. One simple form begged another.

Before delivering the finished piece, I modeled it again in Rhino for further development toward a wholly-bronze edition, again using MicroScribe to collect the data. Illustrated is a concept model that I am using to design the molds for the bronze.

One feature of the completed sculpture was too detailed to represent in a Rhino model, given memory constraints on my machine. In the original, I textured one surface of the stone by carving hundreds of hemispherical depressions with a rotating diamond ball. The depressions are arranged in a hexagonal packing pattern and all have the same radius, and produce dramatic modeling, especially with sunlight.

It was easy to create an "egg carton" of spheres embedded in an offset copy of the surface I wanted to dimple, then subtract the spheres. But the complexity of the model increased rapidly with number of depressions, slowing my machine to a stop, and I abandoned the idea. Illustrated is a small test patch of dimples.