Veijo Rönkkönen Concrete Figures

Photo: Veli Granö, from the book Self-Made Man, by Veli Granö

Veijo Rönkkönen is a Finnish artist who lives near the Russian border. On his small farm near Parikkala he has created almost 500 life-sized human figures in concrete, many of them exercising and stretching. His sculpture park is apparently open to the public.

There are two good sets of images to look through on Flickr:
http://tinyurl.com/ktjxhc
http://tinyurl.com/mcpyne

Mountainous Molding Project

MuseumRock Products from Louisville KY have made what may very well be the largest molded concrete object ever made. They made the mold in California, shipped it to Hawaii, and poured in hundreds of thousands of pounds of colored grout over a matrix of steel rebar. The finished "rock" measures 136 feet long and 22 feet high. It is part of an educational and interpretive Navajo Indian Memorial located in Na Aina Kai Botanical Garden and Sculpture Park which is slated to be open to the public in 2010.



The mold was made of rubber coated EPS styrofoam. 17,000 pounds of pigment was used to colour the concrete.

http://museumrock.com/most_outrageous_project.htm

Forest Boone of MuseumRock says: "My mix was just a standard grout mix 4,500 psi... one part course manufactured sand and two parts dune sand from Asia mixing in an auger mixer. I poured it in about 20 different lifts, changing colors each lift."

Photo credits: MuseumRock

Concrete Camera Parts...

Lens pins. 2009. 3.5 cm (1.5"). Concrete, pigment, gold leaf.

This is an extension of the ideas I was writing about in my previous blog about the concrete cameras. I used the same silicone mold, but only cast small parts of it in the medium of concrete. As I mentioned before, the process of seeing is what interests me, so I have gold-leafed what would be the glass lens in these pieces. I'm still exploring the contrast between precious and non-precious in the jewelry world, so concrete and gold leaf are perfect to express that.

Concrete Cameras

Concrete Camera 1

This is a concept I have been thinking about for some time and am now beginning to resolve, having cast and finished the first two in the series. The concept is that "seeing" is the important part of the creative process; it's perception, not the objects or the media that we use to express our ideas. The central truths of the creative process are in the seeing, or to put it another way, in our points of view.

A concrete camera somehow gets closer to this truth. It has weight and presence. We want to pick it up to see if it works, if we can see through it to capture an image – but we can't. In the first camera (cast from a mold I made of a 1949 Leica, an archetype camera if there ever was one) even the lens is concrete. Nothing is functional, but it reminds us of the process of taking pictures, of seeing, of choosing a subject. My initial idea was to make a lot of these and leave them as artifacts at scenic locations in the countryside, like fossilized records of what we used to record things.

In the second camera I cast a lens in place. (I had earlier applied gold leaf to the back of the lens.) I like the fact that the clarity of the lens connects with the purity of the idea of seeing – and contrasts with the crudeness of the concrete – even though the light goes nowhere, never exposes film, never records anything.

Concrete Camera 2

I'm not sure where the series is going now. A local camera store was able to give me some old lenses that they didn't want, so I have been taking them apart for parts, so I have no shortage of those. I have also been making small concrete pins by casting into parts and corners of the mold.

The concrete mix in these pieces is half sand, half grey Portland cement with the usual additives like stone dust and fibres. The mold is a two-part silicone material that I have written about in other blog postings. The finish is an acrylic colour rubbed into the surface, then a flat clear acrylic spray as a sealer.

Concrete Arches from 1910

Former water filtration plant in Owen Sound, Ontario

Last weekend in an Open Doors tour in my local town of Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada, I discovered what few people even know exists: the abandoned water filtration plant. It was built in 1910 of poured concrete and you can still see the wood grain on the boards that were used to form the graceful arch structure which makes up two 'rooms' each 160' X 80'. Water from the Sydenham River was let into the chambers where it was filtered through a two-foot depth of sand, then through a 12" pipe six miles to the small town. A crew of 400 took two years to build the filter system.

Every couple of months the sand had to be removed and washed, then put back in the rooms through round holes in the roof. The entire structure was buried in earth and grass grown on the top. Over 2,000,000 gallons of water a day was treated by the system.

The filtration system has been closed since the 1960's and due to vandalism is only open to the public on special occasions. You can still walk over the grass on top of the structure and peek in one locked gate by following a trail in the Inglis Falls Conservation area. Owen Sound and Shallow Lake were early centres for Portland cement production from the 1880's.

http://www.greysauble.on.ca/ca-inglisfalls3.html

Timelessness and Concrete

Thinking about concrete and timelessness, I came across a reference from The Long Now about a web site that archives "the most fascinating abandoned man-made creations." The site is called Artificial Owl and is a wonderful collection of photographs of abandoned man-made creations from around the world. Here I stumbled on this image of a large concrete face sculpture of Ferdinand Marcos; the photograph was taken following an explosion in 2002 that defaced it. There are more images here, with some "before" photographs.

Two comments:
First, it makes one think about how long most concrete art will be around, unless it is willfully destroyed, and even then the rubble will be around for a long time. One of the appeals of concrete for artists is this timelessness.
Second, this makes a great example of how to build a large-scale ferrocement sculpture... Notice the strong armature made from reinforced concrete pillars. The armature has been wrapped and overlaid with steel rebar, and a concrete mix applied to that. The concrete has been applied in sections, whether that is to imitate stone blocks or to control cracking I'm not sure. It looks like the interior space is large enough to be a room - shades of the movie Being Jon Malkovich.

More Girli Concrete

Concrete and linen from Tactility Factory

Girli Concrete has just announced their new web site, called Tactility Factory:
http://www.tactilityfactory.com/

The company's aim is to make more "tactile" concrete, which means adding fabric to the surface of concrete, usually through casting it in place. The web site explains that Tactility Factory both works on specific commissions/installations and also partners with the concrete industry to produce larger quantities of precast objects such as tiles.