Driftwood wall sculpture made by David Ward Stick artist
This is a new stick art piece incorporating driftwood from many hours of beach combing on beautiful Northern California beaches and then installed in Santa Monica near Malibu in a beautiful beach cottage impeccably styled and furnished. Wait a minute, this is work!?
My first thoughts were how am I going to get this somewhat soft and non structural driftwood to hold together? I didn’t come up with any solutions! Then the client said why don’t you use a combination of your stick art and the driftwood? This idea provided the glue, in the form of scotch broom branches, to hold it all together so to speak!
Most stick art projects provide a stumper, usually in the form of how the hell am I going to make this work!? Collaboration is a great help to provide organic ideas, if you are aware, providing solutions to many vexing questions and unsolvable design quandaries.So found art are like found ideas. They are laying around, after floating around the ocean, until they wash up and you bend down and pick them up. The kicker of this installation was that the finished piece was pretty heavy! I had to hold the piece above this bed in place and drill the holes in the branches that would secure it to the wall. In this case pretty impossible. The client said can I help you? At first I said no. Then after some struggle(alright a lot) I said can you hold this in place while I drill holes and put screws in? She said I will give it a shot. Luckily she was fit and strong enough to make it happen! I don’t think up to this point in my career I have had a client able to do this and just in the nick of time! Life is magic!! Bend down and find it!