Sculpture

Name Black Spider
Material Black Marble with Light Grey Streaks
Block Pre-Historic River Pebble
Origin Yatagan, Turkey
Entity Inception Date 2008 July

11 Black Spider

This marble pebble was initially intended to be a simple pair of bookends, slice off the bottom, cut in half and polish the exposed faces. However this pebble proved to be very hard, so another pebble was used for the bookends. I read somewhere that freshly quarried marble is softer than weathered marble, so I guess my pebbles are as hard as marble gets. Of course there are marbles that vary in their hardness depending on the metamorphic process.

So, for a spider with delicate legs this hard black marble pebble was ideal. Even so great care had to be taken wielding the angle grinder, at each stage the legs were thinned down a little more and shaped.

Like all my sculptures I have a basic idea of the shape of what is in the pebble but the final details 'evolve'. The ribbed appearance of the spiders underbelly flowing around from the underside of the legs just appeared, it was logically the only finish.

Once the tips of the legs were finished I decided that it was too fragile to leave as it was, I therefore selected another flattish black marble pebble to make a base. I finished the top of the base to a high polish, stuck strips of masking tape onto it, placed the spider on and marked around each 'foot'. I then drilled a shallow indent for each foot. Attaching 'black spider' to his permanent base was just 8 spots of superglue away.

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