Musical Prosthetics

I bought some copper wire and started experimenting with the shape and form of triangle prisms. I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t know what I was doing. I consulted two jewelers, Val and Cathy, and asked what the best way to approach the situation was, and they suggested that I get square wire, and use the bending and scoring method with metal. I went online and ordered three spools of square wire; 12 and 16 gauge bronze wire, and 10 gauge copper wire. I chose bronze because I love the color of bronze and paired it with copper wire for a little color variety. I also thought it would be more visually appealing to have different thicknesses of wire.

Once the wire came in, I was ready to begin experimenting. This was my first time trying the bend and score method with wire, and I was anxious to see the results. I started by making two prisms, one triangle prism, and one trapezoidal prism, to see what they would look like, and to see if I’d like to use both kinds in the project. I decided I only wanted to use the triangular prisms.

I made the prisms in batches of nine, because it was more efficient to work on many prisms at once instead of just one. First, I cut the base triangle wire from the spools, using three pieces of each gauge wire at random lengths. Next, I hammered each wire flat and straightened them out. Then I bent and scored each wire in two places, one for each bend. To bend and score, I taped the wire to the table, and then use my metal scribe and ruler to scribe a line in the metal a few times until I had a nice groove that I could fit my triangular needle file into. Next, I filed into the line with my triangle needle file until I was about ¾ through the wire. Then I switched to my square needle file to open up the angle until I was about 7/8 of the way through the metal. I did this on all of the pieces of wire then added fire to anneal the wire to make it softer. It is very important that you anneal the wire before you try to bend it because if not the wire will break. After annealing all the wire, I folded each strip of wire into a triangle at the joints I had created and soldered them shut. At this point I had just a flat triangle out of metal.

Next, I added the dimension. I did this by taking another piece of wire of the same gauge, hammering it flat, and then adding another bend joint into the wire, annealing, bending and soldering it shut. I filed the bottom of this wire so it would fit up with the triangles and then soldered those together. After that it was easy cutting a third leg and soldering it together to get a prism. The thicker the wire, the longer it takes to make a prism, but I got to the point where I could make nine prisms in two hours. I made prisms for two weeks. I pretty much made them until I ran out of wire, and as a result of that I used up two spools of one-pound wire purely on prisms. The hardest part about making the prisms was that my hands got really tired, and it was tedious and boring work. I took lots of breaks for my hands, and I watched a lot of TED Talks to keep my mind engaged.

I've been thinking about how I want to create this series of musical prosthetics. I have a concept of a set of three, and ready to start the first one. For my first prosthetic I've decided to start out with the emotion of mad, angry, irritated. I'm envisioning how we get cocky when we get angry, and I am inspired to make this piece a jewelry piece of sorts, visually elevating the body to look superior. This would convey the, “I know best” feeling that comes along with anger. Now that I have decided I am interested in a jewelry concept, I've begun looking online at various wearable sculptures for inspiration. I am really interested in how wire looks on the body. Because this piece is a dance piece, I don’t want to cover the body and hide it, so find myself drawn to wire and the way it creates form without suffocating the body.  

I started sketching and came up with the idea of a wearable sculpture that would build in shards off of the human body, growing organically off of the human form as a series of prisms. The prisms would protrude outwards from the body, creating spikes in an offensive armor-like way. The spikes would keep people out and away, but also protect the wearer, keeping them safe as a defensive mechanism. Once I had my sketch I felt confident in my direction and started trying to figure out how to build this prosthetic.