The Saddle Tree

[chocolateducttape]

So, the latest assignment in my sculpture class was to take the basic idea of a cane (like a walking cane) or staff, and adapt it to our place in the twenty-first century. My original plan was to make an actual cane and affix a saddle to the top of it, taking the saddle from a means of comfort while on a horse to a means of support on the ground. (Well, to be perfectly honest, I just wanted to make a mini saddle; that was what my teacher read into it so I went with it.) I wanted to use natural wood, so he suggested using something with good gestural lines to break up the visual space. Then I went wandering in the woods and I found the most perfect branch ever. It was big enough that it looked fairly tree-like, so I decided to put my little saddle up in the tree. Then the play on words came to me (you know... saddle tree... haha...) and I fell in love with it. So here is the result of that. I have to keep explaining to people why it's funny though. The contemporary elements are in the carving pattern; basically I tried to make that as modern-looking as I could while still holding onto the basic floral carving scheme.

The critique was really useful and I got a lot of good ideas out of that. My professor suggested trying to meld the different parts a little more, since at the moment it's kind of blocky- there's the saddle, and then there's the tree, and then there's the pot, and they don't really have a whole lot to do with each other on a visual level. So if I do another project along these lines, I'm going to work with tooling and dyes and see if I can come up with a bark-like pattern to put some continuity between the tree and the saddle. While I was working I was also intrigued by all the similarities between working wood and working leather; you use a lot of the same finishes, they're both organic so you have to pay attention to natural imperfections as you work, iron will discolor both of them, they both swell and become more pliable when you get them wet... and so on. So that got me thinking about how the saddle can kind of grow out of the tree, literally and figuratively, since you get both tannic acid and the actual saddle tree from trees.

There are also a lot of things I'll want to improve next time. I made the tree (the one inside the saddle) myself, and it turned out kind of awkward because the fork wound up with not the greatest shape; the bars are way too thick and flat. This affected the shape of the saddle, obviously, which is extremely wide and flat. Also the skirts are really smooshed together at the top. I wound up making the horn out of clay wrapped around a little wire nail, and it kept breaking as I was covering it, so I think next time I'll use a bigger nail and give it a horn-like shape instead of trying to cover it with clay to get the shape. The stirrups will take some more thought too.

I learned a lot while doing this though. It was definitely a fun project.