Jabberwock Pt.3: Initial Research...

In addition to the Bradford Industrial Museum visit, I went around a few other local haunts, snapping pics of any bits of machinery which might be of interest.  Above, an early caterpillar-tracked industrial tractor, seen at a garden centre in Yorkshire...

Then a military-issue lamp...

...and horse armour, both seen at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. 

Then onto the National Railway Museum in York.  The miniature of the Breakdown Crane threw some ideas in about the form a final build could take.

Most interesting though were the early locomotives; the replica of "Rocket" being particularly of interest for a compact design of self-propelled machine, and something that could be used as a starting point.

The cylinders were of particular interest for this project, as a means of solving the propulsion of the final machine, and adding a hint of movement to proceedings.

I also ended up at the NRM outstation of Shildon, County Durham, gathering some further ideas...

So lots of food for thought there.  It was time to get sketching and building some concept models...

Jabberwock Pt.2: Bradford Industrial Museum visit.

Ah, Bradford Industrial Museum.  A lovely place in which to undertake an exercise in watching funding cut-backs.  I’ve been visiting the museum for years, and play a game called ‘what has been scrapped this time’ (Working Horses?  Gone.  Canteen?  Gone.  Staff?  Mainly Gone).  Still, we have the 5th richest economy on the planet, and all that...

Politics aside, this is still a fantastic place if you like the smell of machine oil and watching spinning bits of metal.  It reminds me of the old Birmingham Industrial Museum, before it became ‘Think Tank’ (and was squashed into a modern building, an entry fee was slapped on it, and it was filled with push-button games rather than industry).

Mainly dedicated to the local woolen/mill industries, it is filled with many working machines salvaged from around West Yorkshire.

I like the punchcards on this machine, and using some nod to these would tie-in nicely with some established tropes of the Steampunk genre, such as the legendary Difference Engine and Lovaelace&Babbage's early computer designs...

Perhaps a little out of time frame, but the aesthetics of the dial (etched white on black background) is rather nice...

Some inspiration from this horse-drawn fire appliance, which looks a tad anthropomorphous anyway with this eye-like portals at the front.  Also note the vertical-boiler... something similar, but for propulsion, might be rather nice for my own design.

These large drill bits... teeth of the monster?

Lamps like the ones on the tram, for eyes perhaps?

Nostalgia aside, onto the relevant exhibits.  Really I was looking for odds and ends which might fire the inspiration, so most of the photos were of random gauge-glasses, pistons, and the like.  At this stage I still had no proper plan for what the Jabberwock would look like.  The museum is mainly dedicated to the powered machine, the weaving engine and the printing press (there are also vehicles, but at the time of the visit the transport gallery was mainly shut for roof mending… most of the vehicles are locally-built cars though, which would stray the project into Dieslpunk territory, firmly outside the Alice timeframe I've set myself to work in).

Well the research visit helped enormously, and led me to wanting to take a logical approach to the design of this monster.  In the books, the world beyond the Looking Glass is implied to not be real, but just a figment of the imagination of Alice, but there are some rather more ambiguous hints.  As far as the place itself is concerned though, and the creatures inside it, it IS real; that is, it operates as a place without Alice when she is not interacting with specific elements of it. 

What I mean is that the creatures she encounters have lives either side of their conversations with Alice.  So as far as I was concerned, the first point for me as regards this project is that Wonderland should be considered a real place.  That doesn’t mean I have a craving to walk through a mirror and live there or anything (though even with monsters, it sounds better than some of the places I've lived over the years) but it meant that some sort of real-world physics would apply.

Secondly, the world isn’t just wizards, prancing unicorns, and fairies, but has technology- for example Alice specifically travels by train at an early point in the story of "Looking Glass".  But I preferred the idea that the Jabberwock, this bizarre, one of a kind monster, somehow is alien to this world beyond the looking glass, and this led me to consider that it might have got there in the same way as she has; that is to say, would be a product of somewhere else, and it fell through into Wonderland somehow.

However, I couldn’t see any sort of machine in ‘our’ world which quite fit the bill.  I toyed with the idea of weaving machines and the like, and the whole Luddite rebellion against technology, the battles between Romanticists and the early railways, and the like.  But no one machine quite fitted with how I was thinking.

It did lead me to wondering if I could incorporate my own earlier Steampunk project work.  That earlier project was set in the Victorian past of “Britannia” (the alternate-Britain which was the setting of the Model Village and a few other projects).  Britannia is meant to be more advanced, technologically speaking, during Victorian times –in best Steampunk contrived tradition- so it would make sense for the Jabberwock machine to have originated in Britannia, yet another alternate-world in the same vein as that beyond the Looking Glass.  That would free me from having to slavishly copy any real world designs.

Thirdly, what would it represent?  I’d consider Wonderland something of a romanticised version of the world, in a way; when it was written, Victorian Britain was rocketing along, society changing by the implementation of machines and technology.  So this steam-powered Jabberwock monster could represent the intrusion of this terrifying machinery into the world, a metaphor if you like for technology trampling on nature and invading rural spaces, much as some contemporaries of Lewis Carrol saw things like the railways.  The industrial museum trip prompted thoughts about the mechanisation of the textiles industry, in a similar vein of thinking… The image of the monster being something like a self-propelled weaving engine perhaps.

Fourthly, it had to look like something that could work…  So that also prompted some logical questions.  How would it ‘operate’?  Would it be somehow self-aware, or under the control of some other creature?  Where would it get fuel, how would it move around, what was its purpose, why did it cause chaos and become so feared that people would be trying to kill it?

Fifthly, was I overcomplicating things, as per usual with my projects, and would anyone else give a damn about the logical reasoning?

I did a few rough sketches, but then realised I would need to do something practical, and make some models.  That, and I enjoy making models of course, but it was mainly because I was having issues with visualising all this in my head…  This would end up leading to a series of models in fact, as I tried different routes and themes, to see how they might look beyond just being sketches…

Jabberwock Pt.1: In The Beginning...

The Curiously Long-Winded Tale of the Steampunk Jabberwock!

Or rather, Alice in Rydal Hall, in Ambleside, in the Lake District (also not a catchy a title, I admit)

OK so it has been quite some time since this blog was updated, for the very good reason that I have been busy with photography and art projects, documented through the Ribbon blog.  Some time ago I started putting together a massive series of posts about the Jabberwock sculpture I built, then for one reason or another I never got around to finishing the posts off.  Now, however, here we go...

So here begins a mighty saga… the complete back story of the creation of the sculptures for the Alice in Wonderland show at Rydal; specifically the Jabberwock, the Cheshire Cat, and the Rocking Horse Fly sculpture pieces.  Whereas the Ribbon Art and Photography blog just touched on the ‘making of’ this is going to be a lot more in-depth.  Imagine that the other blog is the standard DVD they rush out immediately after release, and this blog is the Blue-Ray with the exhaustive behind-the-scenes features that only the true nerds watch.  On which nerdy note...

To tell the tale of the Jabberwock Sculpture, it is necessary to tell the tale of some of the people behind it (to plagiarise Douglas Adams...)

Clare, a housemate and friend from Uni days (a slightly-sobering decade or more ago) is now part of an arts group called The Lakes Collective, based around Ambleside, Cumbria, The North.  Every year they hold a big exhibition, and we (the wife and I) have contributed work to several of them down the years, generally small sculpture pieces.  The theme of the 2016 exhibition was work inspired by the two Alice books, Wonderland and Looking Glass.  As soon as it was mentioned to us, some time well in advance of the deadline, 2014 in fact, we were well up for this one, as we both love the Alice books, and enjoy doing small sculpture pieces.

Amy came up with an idea quite quickly, which was to incorporate her love of working with textiles and thus designed a piece featuring the playing cards theme which runs throughout Wonderland.  I, being by natural inclination more of a nerd, and in a discussion with Clare which got a bit out of hand (where enthusiasm top-trumped common sense) ended up wanting to go down a more Steampunk route, with an interpretation of the Jabberwock creature from Looking Glass.

The location for a planned art installation, this corner of the formal gardens at Rydal Hall.

The plan at this point was to install something in these, the flowerbeds by the retaining wall.

So we came away from Ambleside, happy in the knowledge we had another big art project to focus on, and it wasn't until about 3am the next morning I realised that I had talked myself into building a life-sized interpretation of a fictional monster, as seen through the eyes of a Victorian Industrialist.

Bugger.

Still, I was in a job with a couple of weekdays off, so no distractions whilst all my friends and family worked, and I reckoned it would be an enjoyable challenge, having never before worked on such a scale with such a big sculpture piece needing doing.

Of course then we had three foster children move in with us, somewhat unexpectedly (and which is not as precisely like the plot of “Despicable Me” as it might at first sound, nor as funny), which catastrophically reduced free time, funds, and storage space for the project. 

But oh well, what the hell, we needed a ‘big’ brief to work towards after “The Home Is…” project finished, and to distract us a bit from the mind-numbing administrative bureaucracy of the Social Services side of fostering, so we ploughed on regardless.  The show was going to be in April 2016, so we felt a comfortable distance away from it, and thus I planned to work on the piece in a nice, sedate fashion, carefully timetabled, with no last minute rushes or panic.

Ha, haha, ha-haaaa…

And Hast Thou Designed the Jabberwock?

First a bit of background then.  In the context of “Alice's Adventures through the Looking Glass”, young Alice reads a poem about a boy being sent to fight a creature called the Jabberwock.  It is a ‘nonesense’ poem, featuring many made up words, and has somewhat passed into the collective conscience.  From a very nerdy point of view (and I am very much of a nerd), the poem is a direct inspiration for the Vogon Poetry in “Hitch Hikers” which is somehow pleasing.  I wont go into nauseating detail though about the poem as anyone interested can look it up, and this is an art blog, not an English Lit one.  The story about the Jabberwock is thought to have been inspired by the Northumbrian folk-tale, “The Lambton Wyrm” which is also worth looking up, if you want extra credit on your final essay and the exam which will be at the end of this module.

The Jabberwock Monster has been interpreted a number of times over the years, the more famous renderings being the original illustration in the book (a kind of towering dragon-creature), the Terry Gilliam film (practical effect monster based closely on the book illustration) and the Tim Burton film (CGI monster, again inspired by the book).  There have also been Steampunk versions of it done, because nothing is original these days, which also puts me to something of a problem.

I didn’t want to copy what has gone before, and was also somewhat hamstrung by practical concerns such as:

a) Where to Build it

 b) How to Transport it

 c) How to Afford to Build it and Transport it.

d) Where to hide and have a humiliating panic attack about points a-c.

Much of the Steampunk work I’ve done in the past was also with miniatures; in fact the last time I did any ‘large scale’ builds like this was College (excluding specialist builds like the furniture for “The Home Is…”).

The main points though which came through from the poem, which were features I would need to include, were:

It is a bloody big monster which lives in the woods and terrorises the place

“The Jaws that Bite, the Claws that Catch!”

“Eyes of Flame”

“Came Whiffling through the tulgey wood, and Burbled as it came!”

Which suggested to me a large monster which stalked through the trees (rather than flying, despite the wings of the illustration), it had big teeth, sharp claws, fiery eyes, and made a burbling noise (this last rather suiting the Steampunk vibe, suggesting a boiling kettle).

After a few initial sketches and notes, I decided I needed some inspiration, so forthwith before the Tories close it altogether, it was off to the Bradford Industrial Museum for research…