Rabbit and Shrew

The theme of this project was sustainability, I choose to take this meaning as to consider how materials for work can be sourced and used sustainably.

This led me to look for wood in a nearby forest where I live. This peice of wood was cut by the local council as part of forest managment which meant regardless of my presence this wood would still have been cut down making it found material. While it was damp with a little bit of rot it was not too deebly set and could be cleaned away for a solid piece of wood and since it was a conveint size I chose this piece to carve the rabbit from.

I started by drawing out a basic shape of the rabbit so I could work out how much material I had to work with.

The the largest spaces of unneeded material were cut away using a saw.

Once the largest pieces were sawed off I used a large wood carving chisel to start rounding down the form.

After the basic form was finished a smaller chisel was used to smooth down the surface and carve into smaller areas.

Unfortuantly during the carving process the ear broke off: to fix this I used glue to fix it back on with duct tape to hold them firmly in place while it dried to make sure it did not slip or that the glue did not push the join outwards.

Once the join was fixed a small chisel (around 1cm head) was used to carve the smaller details such as the eyes and nose as well as to shave down rough lines to make the form smoother.

Due to the wood being water logged when found it had abrubtly cracked during the carving process. Leaving the log to dry out before carving may have been able to prevent this cracking.

A shrew was created by carving a tail from a stick and joining it into a small log that was found in the same forest as the log for the rabbit.

The final installation used pinecones found in the forest and left over wood shaving to create a bed around the two carvings.