Kune Kune is a Japanese phrase that roughly translates as "many twist and turns". It seemed like a good description of some different ideas we've been working on.
The first piece we did that started us on the Kune Kune path was an illuminated sculpture we did for the Charlotte Street Awards. I wish that I had better documented the making of this piece. Most people don't realize the engineering and labor that went into making it. The piece was made to fit in the front window of the gallery without causing any damage or modification of the existing sheet metal window surround. The piece is about 6' in height and 21' in length. We constructed two frames out of steel u-channel that provided concealment for the wiring, as well as an anchor for the illuminated knit forms. Inside the the knit forms is a steel armature made from 1/4" steel rod. The lighting elements fastened to the armature and then a flexible plastic tube was slid over the armatures. The forms were then covered by Rie's hand knit tubes.
Some time after the Charlotte Street Awards Hesse McGraw ask us to be in a show at Paragraph Gallery on very short notice. We were quite busy with other commissions but cranked out these two pieces in the evening (second shift) hours in under 3 weeks (mostly Rie speed knitting).
When Hesse ask us to be in the show at Paragraph, we had been thinking about how we wanted to develop the piece we had done for The Charlotte Street Awards into a more 3 dimensional composition. At first we began playing around with wire, and then switched over to using plastic tubing that is made for architectural models and masonite. Once we came up with a composition we were happy with, we began to make the finished maquette. We're calling this a maquette because it's a little over 100cm tall, and we really considered it a design study for doing a large scale piece with internal lighting.
In the finished maquette we would be scaling the piece up from the preliminary maquette. Instead of small architectural model plastic tubing, we would be making the armatures from wood and what was masonite in the preliminary maquette would be clear acrylic in the finished maquette. The wood elbows had to be made from scratch. This series of photos show some of the steps in making the elbows.
After the elbows were made, we began gluing up the sections of armature. Aluminum pins and polyurethane glue was used to join the pieces. Various clamps, weights, blocks, and tape were used to keep the sections in alignment while the glue dried.
After the glue dried, the sections were sanded smooth in preparation for painting them white
Knitting the sheaths and sliding them over the painted armatures.
The finished maquette
A few renderings where we pitched "Kune Kune" as proposals for outdoor public art.
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