Types of Wire for Sculptures

Video Transcript

DEB HUGLIN VOGEL: Hi, I'm Debbie "The Roboteer." And I'm here at SDAI: Museum of the Living Artist for Expert Village, and we're working on wire sculptures taught to me by Sandy Calder. To make wire sculptures, you have to have some wire, and wire is a real interesting product. You can get wire in a number of different kinds of metal. You can get it in different thicknesses. You can get it very strong or very soft. This one's really squishy and soft. And the whole story of wire is really interesting. There was no wire like this in the old days because people would take a piece of metal, just a little glob of metal, and they'd heat it up and smash it into a little kind of bump and then heat it up again and smash it into a longer bump and heat it up again until they had like a long piece. And then they keep hammering it until it got longer and then heat it up and make it flexible. And then they take it and they'd whip it like this and they'd make it longer and longer and longer. So nobody had wire that was more that 10 or 11 feet, because it was according to whoever had mastery of making wire. And so wire was all sorts and kinds of different thicknesses. But at this point in time, we get extruded wire and it's all pretty much the same thing when we get it. So you're going to get a certain kind of gauge and all you have to do is try bending it to see if that happens to be the one you like. I would try a hardware store first and then move my way up to perhaps the suppliers that have contractors' materials. You might find wire laying around the road because it often falls off contractors' trucks or people have been building something and you can find some wire. Don't be afraid of it. It doesn't have to be new. And you can use the kind with the casing on it that's used for electrical things. The casings are beautiful.

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