#steel armature

[sheltiechicago]

“Cupboard IX” (2019), stoneware, raffia, and steel armature, 78 × 60 × 80 inches. Image courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

A Groundbreaking Monograph Delves Into Simone Leigh’s Enduring Commitment to Centering Black Women

All images © Simone Leigh

“No Face (House)” (2020), terracotta, porcelain, ink, epoxy, and raffia, 29.5 × 24 × 24 inches. Image courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery

[clairity-org]

Katharina Fritsch, Hahn/Cock, 2017, fiberglass, polyester resin, paint, stainless-steel armature 3/22/24 #minneapolissculpturegarden by Sharon Mollerus

[itscolossal]

Hand-Blown Glass Swells Around Steel Armature in Katie Stout’s Bubbly Lamps

[dinodorks]

[ The skull is mounted on a custom steel armature, which allows for it to be seen all the way around. ]

"After seven years of work, the best preserved and most complete triceratops skull coming from Canada — also known as the "Calli" specimen — is on display for the first time since being found in 2014 at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta. A museum news release calls the specimen "unique" because of where it was discovered, the age of the rock around it, and how well it was preserved. Following the floods that tore through Alberta about 10 years ago, the Royal Tyrrell staff were engaged in flood mitigation paleontology work when the triceratops skull was discovered in 2014. Triceratops fossils are rare in Canada. This skull was found in the foothills of southwestern Alberta — an area where dinosaur fossils in general are uncommon — and nicknamed "Calli" after Callum Creek, the stream where it was discovered. Transported via helicopter in giant, heavy chunks, the skull and most of the jaw pieces were extracted over the course of a month in 2015. The rest of the triceratops' skeleton was not found. Roaming the earth roughly 68 to 69 million years ago, the museum says this skull was buried in stages, evident by the fossilization process.  "Paleontologists know this because the specimen was found in different rock layers, and the poorly preserved horn tips suggest they were exposed to additional weathering and erosion," reads a museum blog about the triceratops skull.  "The rest of the skeleton likely washed away," noting that the lower jaws were found downstream. From 2016 to 2023, Royal Tyrrell technician Ian Macdonald spent over 6,500 hours preparing this fossil, removing over 815 kilograms of rock that encased the skull. This triceratops skull is the largest skull ever prepared at the museum and its third largest on display."

Read more: "Canada's biggest and best triceratops skull on display in Alberta" by Lily Dupuis.

[flame-shadow]

Etcetera for @slitherbop !!!!!

Secret santa time woooooooo! I took a lot of pics of the steps, so I'll throw those under the cut for anyone who'd like to see the process.

[IDs in alt]

the process in words:

wire armature + foil for volume

base layer of clay for bulk and general shape

more clay + sculpting for final shapes and details

baked sculpture! this is also where it got sanded

various stages of applying paint

materials: the wire is steel, the foil is aluminum, the clay is sculpy, the paint is acrylic, and as a final step after painting, i sprayed it with a matte fixative so that the paint wouldn't be sticky or shiny

[stevetoppsculpture]

The wooden clay armature, Hello dear friends tonight I wanted to present a photo that would be a real insight into the making of a life size sculpture.

This photo shows the life size wooden armature that I created for a previous statue I've presented on here called The Glamour Girl. This is what's inside of the clay in order to hold the sculpture in shape.

The aim of the armature is to take the weight of the clay and the armature must fit inside of the clay the same way that a skeleton fits inside the human body.

I usually create my armatures out of wood, steel brackets and nuts and bolts and once the armature is in place and the figures pose is correct. I then cover the armature with clay and slowly build up the figure and face and any clothes etc.

Of course when you look at the clay sculpture, you wouldn't know there was an armature inside, but there is and it's a very important factor of a sculpted project.

I'll post again very soon, I hope you're having a fine week, keep well and Take care ☺️👋

[xphaiea]

Linde Ivimey, Suolo 2021

steel armature, acrylic resin, natural and cast goat, bird, fish and snake bones, dyed cotton, natural viscera, natural and acrylic fibre, leather, feathers, smoky quartz

[monsterforge]

Khajiit doll w/steel stop motion style armature. My first one. I love her so much. I want to improve my costuming skills to include armor.

[cosmicanger]

Joyce J. Scott

Garden Ensconced, 2024

Plastic and glass beads, yarn, knotted fabric by Elizabeth Talford Scott, crochet, ribbon, painted stainless steel armature

124 1/4 × 93 × 6 1/4 in | 315.6 × 236.2 × 15.9

[creaturecave]

Hi there, I'm still here. I've been melting under the heat here in the UK, as well as taking care of some urgent house DIY! I've not much exciting to show you, but here's the original comparison of Avineahr from a while back!

She has a steel ball and socket armature inside her, and is fully posable. She's still one of my favourite characters I've brought to life, she's so sweet.

[mentaltimetraveller]

Andrea Fraser, Untitled (Object II), 2024

Microcrystalline wax, aluminum and steel armatures Sculpture: 5 7/8 x 35 3/8 x 15 3/4 in. (15 x 90 x 40 cm) Pedestal: 33 1/2 x 47 1/4 x 23 5/8 in. (85 x 120 x 60 cm) Plexiglas case: 19 3/4 x 47 1/4 x 23 5/8 in. (50 x 120 x 60 cm)

at Marian Goodman Gallery

[grimanimation]

Some higher quality pictures of my Alestes puppet from my Trice Forgotten animation as well as some set props and pictures from the process of making the puppet.

Image descriptions below

1 - Front view of the Alestes puppet

2 - Side view of the Alestes puppet

3 - Alestes puppet posed at a 3/4 angle while holding her sword and looking into the camera

4 - Alestes puppet next to a ruler showing that she is about 10.5 inches (26.67 cm) tall

5 - Zoomed out image of the full set and puppet while the animation was being shot. Alestes is facing a barrel and holding her sword towards it. A webcam is taped to a box and angled slightly upward.

6 - Two of the barrels built for the set. The left is a barrel used only in the background, so it's less detailed and only has three metallic rings. The right is one of the two barrels used close up, so it is fully detailed, has all six metallic rings, and the seam going through the center is covered.

7 - Close up of Alestes's sword and coin purse with a quarter for scale. (Side note: The sword handle is wrapped in steel wire painted brown, and the coin purse has a ball of steel wire inside so that both props would stay attached to the magnet in Alestes's right hand while animating)

8 - Front and side drawing of the design for Alestes's puppet and armature.

9 - The assembled pieces of Alestes's armature laid over it's corresponding parts of the original design to show how it will come together

10 - The fully assembled armature for the Alestes puppet

11 - The assembled armature covered with foam to give it the shape of her body except for the head, hands, and boots

12 - Maquette of the puppet's hands made from gray Plastalina

13 - Maquette of the puppet's boots made from gray Plastalina. The folded over tops of the boots are sculpted and attached later to prevent undercuts while casting.

14 - Open molds for the head, hands, and boots

15 - Armature with foam and attached hands and boots made of silicone

[clairity-org]

Sophie Ryder, Crawling Lady Hare, 1997, Galvanized wire on steel armature, 10/27/22 #cheekwood #sculpture by Sharon Mollerus

[nightshadereaper66]

Ethanol and Mothballs

Word Count: 2.1k This short story is inspired by the museum collections that I visited during my January paleontology class. All of the pictures used are mine and were taken at the various museums we visited. I'm super excited to share this story with y'all, and hope you love it as much as I do!

The halls of the museum are quiet. The day has ended, night plunging the rooms into eerie darkness. Gone are the copious beams of sunlight flowing through the windows. They now show only the gray haze of the city's night sky, plunging the marble halls into obscurity. It's the end of the hustle and bustle of tourists, of the cheerful shouts and giggles of children, and more subdued conversations of adults. The darkness is broken only by the flashlight beams of security guards working the graveyard shift. 

Occasionally, their light settles on the bones of long-dead animals resting peacefully in their wire armatures, casting odd, distorted shadows across the walls. The umbral forms of prehistoric fossils dance with the shadows of the guards, brought halfway to life only briefly by their light. 

The silence is broken only by footsteps on carpet, the whirring of the climate systems, and the building's occasional creak and groan. All is still as it should be; quietly resting after the long day. It would seem that the museum dies at night.

I open my eyes, hearing the slosh of fluid around me as I shakily stretch, limbs hitting the hard edges of my tub. I groan, my voice gravelly from disuse. Finally, it's time to wake up. I sit up, my poorly adjusted eyes only seeing the occasional glint of light reflecting off the trails of ethanol crisscrossing the floor. My muscles are cramped; I barely see my pale limbs tremoring in front of me. I shake, struggling to find a grip on the sterile stainless steel until I manage to grab the edge of the tub. Slowly my eyes adjust to the welcoming darkness, a wonderful reprieve from bright fluorescent lights. The air is thick with the smell of ethanol. Always ethanol here, it clings to everything and everyone, a constant reminder of the place where we reside.

As my vision improves, I can make out the shapes of the shelves in the darkness. They stand in a puddle of ethanol, trails and prints radiating in all directions from it. My tremors slowly subside as my body fights the vestiges of the cold sleep.

I watch a snake slither out of its jar, landing in the ethanol puddle with a quiet plash. It's quickly followed by its jar-mates, then the frogs from the jar next door. 

The soft sloshes are interrupted by a loud series of splashes and thrashes coming from a large tub on the far side of the wet lab. The smell of ethanol intensifies as the massive alligator snapping turtle inside sends liquid everywhere in his energetic bid for freedom. I climb out of my tub, walking off the stiffness and the last of the tremors before pulling the turtle out by the back of his shell.

“Happy wake-up, Troy,” I say as he starts to wander around the room, leaving behind a broad, messy ethanol trail. He opens his mouth wide, looking straight at me. I’m never sure if that's his version of a smile or a death threat.

The shelves are alive, undocumented insects trundling among their more well-known friends. One jar spews hundreds of tiny snails as they crawl over each other and to the ground, trailing ethanol instead of mucus. I twist off the lid to another snail jar; this one is always particularly stubborn. As I pull off the lid, a giant African land snail creeps out onto my arm.

“Yeah, alright buddy, we can go for a walk. Stretch your, er, foot.”

Snail crawls up my torso and onto my shoulder. I gently pat them between their eyestalks and scratch their shell.

“Just give me a second to let the fish out,” I say, unscrewing the lids of the fish jars and letting them swim out into my large tub, “Have fun, guys. It's not much, but it's better than being stuck like sardines in a can. Or a jar, I guess.”

Troy the snapping turtle shuffles over to watch them schooling.

“You can't eat anymore, remember? None of us can. Don't try it, Troy.”

He opens his mouth, giving me another smile/death threat.

“Thank you.”

I slide Dr. MacMorgan's I.D. out from under a dusty, overlooked jar of rhino beetles on the top shelf. I'm grateful for the museum's leniency in issuing him a second I.D. after this one went missing. He claimed he lost the thing, after all, his eyes “aren't what they used to be,” and his memory “is full of cotton wool these days.” I think the curator also helped to fast-track the process. She definitely didn't ask many questions.

Anyway, I had a garden snail steal the I.D. so that I could walk around collections. What can I say, I got tired of only exploring when the man forgot it in the piles of paperwork on his desk. Feelings and federal laws don’t matter much when you’re dead. Besides, now I can go check out the new research posters they put on the walls. It's nice to know that they're still using us for something. 

I swipe the I.D. and step into the hall. The smell of ethanol fades as the door to the wet lab closes. Snail crawls onto my head for a better view as I step into the bathroom and look at our reflection. The light turns on automatically as I walk in, and I wince as my eyes struggle to adjust. I look at myself in the mirror; my cheeks are sallow, cloudy eyes sunk into yellowed skin. A little worse for wear, but not bad, I haven’t aged a day. I examine my arms, running my fingers over the relatively new needle-hole in one of them. It showed up a few months back, but it’ll never heal. Presumably, it was for a tissue sample; I wonder what they’re using it for. I have been dead and pickled in ethanol for a while, it was about time. Snail (who I seem to be wearing as a hat) looks a little better-preserved, but their body still has that yellowish color that all wet lab residents tend to get. My snail hat waves their eyestalks towards the door emphatically. 

“Okay, okay, I’m going!” I say, stepping back out of the bathroom and into the darkness of the halls. “Where to now?”

They crawl down to my forehead, waving their left eye stalk in front of my eye.

“Alright, fossils it is. I know you like the shark teeth.” They do a move resembling a one-snail wave in appreciation. I smile, heading through the maze of nearly identical corridors. I see the light of a flashlight ahead and duck into an empty office, narrowly avoiding someone. It's probably just a grad student returning from the vending machine with their energy drink. I wait until the light is gone and slip back into the halls.

“Hey look! They extracted my DNA and used it to do some stuff. That explains the needle hole in my arm,” I say, pointing out a poster on the wall. I step close so that Snail can read it. At least, I think they can read. Their eyestalks scan over the lines of text and appear to understand as they pull back. 

They settle back on my forehead and I set off once more, finally reaching the thick, heavy door to the fossil collections. I scan the I.D. and the light blinks green, letting me in beyond the large gray door. We are hit with the strong smell of mothballs and the crisp, strictly temperature and humidity-controlled air. The lights turn on automatically, illuminating the rows of open shelves and closed metal cabinets.

I walk down the aisles, waiting for Snail to stop me and gesture to whatever cabinet they find interesting. When they do, I open the door. All of the drawers are labeled “glyptodon,” so I pull out a random one. Snail crawls off of me and onto the cabinet, eye stalks investigating the giant armadillo fossils. Mostly osteoderms, the bony bits right under the skin, but some teeth and small bones. When they’re satisfied, I close the cabinet and open a nearby one. 

We proceed in a similar fashion for a while, opening whatever cabinets strike our fancy and stopping to admire the fossils inside. Snail crawls back onto my head and we look at the skulls that rest on the open shelves. There are plenty of mammoths and mastodons, recognizable by their massive teeth. The mammoth teeth are more flat, while mastodons’ are more pointy unless they’ve been worn down a lot.

I run my hand along the glossier fossilized enamel, wondering what the fossils would get up to if they could move around at night. They’re just rock-ified bones (the fancy descriptor is permineralized), so they’d fall apart, assuming that they hadn’t already. The Earth is a blender, or so I hear. 

Snail prefers the smaller fossils, so they’re content to stay on my head as I trace the contours of huge tusks, dino bones, and skulls. It’s crazy to think that some of this stuff is still closer in age to spaghetti than to the beginning of life. It sure seems like it’s been fossilized for ages. And then some paleontologist dug it up and encased it in plaster and a volunteer put in thousands of hours to clean it up. 

“Having a nice wander?”

I jump, snapping abruptly out of my thoughts. The voice comes from behind me. Snail retreats into their shell, still on top of my head. Act like a normal person. One who hasn’t been dead and preserved in ethanol for fifty years.

“Hi! I uh, have a really bad skincare routine!”

She laughs. I turn around. It’s the museum curator. She’s wearing a headlamp; it’s still turned on. She raises a hand to turn it off since it’s not needed in the automatic lighting of the fossil collections.

“That tends to happen when you’re a wet lab specimen.”

“You know about that?” I ask as Snail peeks out of their shell, eyestalks fixed on her. The curator’s gaze tracks up at them, then back to my cloudy eyes.

“Yes. How do you think MacMorgan got a new I.D. so quickly?” Seeing my look of concern, she adds, “I don’t mind if you leave the wet lab, as long as you don’t make a mess.”

“Uhh… okay…” I say, still trying to process the new turn of events.

“Some people think that this building is haunted. I see why they would say that. I passed you in the hall earlier, you look very sinister,” she says, smiling.

“That was you, with the light? I thought it was a grad student! Dammit, I need to be more careful,” I reply, looking perturbed.

“You could, or you could keep letting the world believe that this building is haunted.” The curator seems to be enjoying this conversation. She reaches out a hand to pet Snail’s shell. After a few moments, she speaks again, “It can be our little secret.”

“You’re not scared by me? I’m literally dead and pickled, how are you fine with this?”

She laughs again. “I used to work in a wet lab, I’m quite accustomed to seeing preserved organisms. And if you want to have a little fun at night, I suppose I can continue to turn a blind eye.”

I nod awkwardly, surprised by her casual demeanor. The curator holds out her phone, the screen showing a clock that reads 4:13 a.m. 

“For now, it’s time to go back to bed,” she says as the screen turns off. I stare into my reflection in the black glass.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll get back to wet lab,” I say, realizing that I’m starting to feel the sluggish feeling that heralds in the morning.

She smiles, turning her headlamp back on as we leave the fossil collections. The curator walks off, disappearing into the shadows of the halls as Snail and I hurry back home. I swipe the I.D. and duck inside, stopping for a moment as I’m hit with the strong smell of ethanol. I help Troy back into his tub, coax Snail into their jar, and gather up the fish swimming in my tub. We’re all much more sluggish as the morning starts to roll in, seeing the sky start to lighten through the window. At last, I collapse back into my tub, trying not to splash too much as I let the ethanol settle back around me.

I drift off into the long day, holding on to the memories of the night. My cloudy eyes don’t close as my muscles stiffen, ready to stay motionless for the next day in the bright lights of the lab. I could run these halls forever, reveling in the shadows of forgotten, forever preserved lives, permeated in the scent of ethanol and mothballs.

[fjordfolk]

How was your night? Mine involved being woken up at 3am by a creature more steel armature than dog, demanding painkillers and Being Held.

Our vet also texted us this morning to see if we needed anything (appreciate) but Sparty is a lot more herself today, so I think we might be over the worst.

[diferartz]

Unusual robot girl features // 8

The archivist of this forgotten library was bound to a track, forced to only be able to trace the same path as she always did. Because of that certain parts of the library began to deteriorate, and as she watched her home become broken she vowed to break free from these cursed tracks.

From the books she loved she began to craft her freedom. Her favorite pages slowly folded into beautiful feathers, all of them reinforced with leather, steel and wires. Through the months she built herself the armature of her plan, from the very steel in her tracks. Bounding herself to her improvised workshop she ached to be free to protect her love.

The library cried in pain during the rain, begged for peace during the drought and struggled with her structure during the blizzards. Her caretaker fought the time and with her determination she ascended.

Wings made from the library for the library, the archivist could finally explore the many shelves she was never allowed to see. Clean where it was never cleaned and explore the unknowns of her home.