Welded steel, 35 x 32 x 22, 2001.
The studios of different arts keep different equipment and the same arrangement. Things lean on walls, hang from hooks and sit on the floor at the foot of whatever they serve, and the sculpture is made of that arrangement. Nearly every part serves more than one trade.
The large plate tilted steeply back is a canvas on an easel, a reflector leaned against a wall for the camera, a piano lid raised on its prop, and a sheet of steel stock leaned in a corner of the workshop. The long rod laid along its face is a painter’s mahlstick, the prop that holds up the lid and a bar of stock. The strip drilled with evenly spaced holes down the left edge is an easel upright with its peg holes and a flute with its finger holes. The row of short prongs at the right edge is a set of pegs on the head of an instrument and also a set of hooks for hanging things.
Squat cylinders and a disc rest on the floor at the foot: paint tins, drums, offcuts, a lens and its cap. A thin wire hangs from a ring at the top and ends in a small curl, and it reads as the wire a picture hangs by and as a camera’s cable release. The tread-patterned plate carries only its own surface. In all four studios the work is elsewhere or still to come, and what is left in the room is the equipment for it.
