Artist Gavin Worth just reached out to us to tell us about latest sculpture or should we say sculptures. When we first came across his steel wire sculptures, we were amazed at not only his craftsmanship but about the stories each told, simple human moments that appeared to be both strong and vulnerable.
For this latest piece, Worth was commissioned by the town of Matha, France (near Cognac and Bordeaux). He was asked to build a large scale metal sculpture about thirst and the importance of water in life. “They are developing a sculpture garden with artwork based on different themes, and I was given this one,” he tells us. “I thought about how thirst is different from hunger, and I thought about how that moment of thirst is completely different to the old and the young. I guess that’s what I tried to capture.
“I came up with the concept of the two planes of images to try to get viewers to walk around the sculpture and really have an experience looking at it from all different sides. I hate getting too artsy, but one of my big influences is Alexander Calder, the inventor of the mobile. He brought movement into the static, stationary world of sculpture. As kind of a testament to him, I wanted to approach his idea of mobility in sculpture by making the viewer the mobile element. The image would completely change as the viewer moves.”
This project would prove to be, both technically and physically, challenging. “All the steel bars had to be bent just right and cut and ground down just right so the welds would be strong,” he says. “I went home every day exhausted, but the really good kind of exhausted.”
Make sure to watch the video, below, from 1:30 on to see the sculpture change its shape when viewed from different angles. (It’s like magic!)
