Past Projects- Sleipnir

Been a little while... again.  Been busy with some projects which should be appearing on here in a bit, but had nothing particularly finished to condition that I wanted to post.  So, to avoid going another month without updates, another past project, and a concept piece which has found its way into half a dozen projects since.

Sleipnir

Back in the day, when I was on the Foundation Year at Stourbridge I really got into making miniatures for projects (unhindered access to a large workshop facility full of power tools helped somewhat).  For one of my projects I decided to explore various aspects of mythology and prediction.  By my terms the resulting sprawling project was an Exploratory Process, though my lecturers described it as an overambitious, rambling mess with no conclusions that almost got me thrown off the course, and which scraped about the bare minimum marks.  Cest la vie.

Anyway, part of the project involved looking at various statues, including this beauty:

Commisioned by Midland Metro, it stands above the tram depot in Wednesbury (which has Norse connections) and represents Odins 8-legged horse.  My Little Mythological War Horse, if you will.  Personally, I love this statue- its one of the very few bits of public art anywhere in the midlands borough that I dont despise.  In an area of high vandalism and metal theft, its astonishing something like this can be left there.  I've always treasured a hope that when I'm a rich, famous (alright stop laughing) succesful person, with a mansion somewhere, I could buy this statue and have it somewhere in my Grounds.

As part of the project, and with a couple of hours to kill in the workshops, I decided to make a model inspired by the statue, just so I could play with photographing miniatures a bit- the wings idea was so I could try some pegasus-type, flying shots.  The body is a piece of thick MDF cut and profiled with a jigsaw, and the wings are thick wire with layered card (cut with shaped-edged scissors) to give styalised representations of feathers.

The model was shot in a box with a photocopied backdrop of clouds, and cotton wool clouds.  This isnt the best shot from that project as you can see the edge of the sky, but it is the only surviving image (two laptop crashes, and a very early digital camera, saw to that).

The model ended up on a shelf at home, and was taken to University just because it was something I was attatched to.  It therefore snook into several other projects, including the Britannia Model Village where it appeared as a piece of sculpture on the roof of an art gallery.  No doubt Sleipnir will ride again, in whatever madcapped project appears next...