The Grand Opening

On Friday the 18th of July at 2pm the HANDS UP! scuplture was unveiled by Nigel Waterson MP and the Year 6 representatives. The opening was attended by Pam, Kevin, Geoff and Nathan from GAP Metal as well as a photographer from the Eastbourne Herald/Hailsham Gazette, so keep a look out for it in the paper!

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people involved in the project and we hope you enjoy the new addition to the school.

Sculpture installed

The sculpture is now installed at Ocklynge school, it took Davie and I about 4 hours of bashing & bolting to get it all to fit together. We finished installing at 9pm.
So that's it, I hope you all like your sculpture, I have enjoyed working with Ocklynge and will miss you all.

Thanks to everyone who has participated for all your help on the project, with special thanks to Zoe Boulton and Davie for being so brilliant.

Latest Sculpture pictures

Today we assembled the sculpture at Gap metal, pupils from Ocklynge visited the sculpture to approve it and agree final colours. The sculpture has now gone off to be powder coated, hopefully we can install next week.

3 White Dots + Colours

The 3 white dots on the ground to the left of the front entrance of the school are to mark where the sculpture will stand, the parts for the sculpture will be laser cut next week.

The chosen colours for the sculpture are Red, Green and Blue. I like the idea of Red, Green, Blue as a combination, with red on one vertical side of the sculpture and Green on another and Blue for the seat, reasons are: you can make any colour out of RGB by varying the intensity of each one (this is how flat screen TV's work) I think this will lead to interesting colour mixes as you look through the holes in the sculpture when you walk by, and good colours in the shadows where the sun reflects off one surface onto another. Red was the winner of the popular vote so the biggest part of the sculpture will be red. The feet will be black.

The sculpture

Using the results of your votes I have designed the sculpture, the key features I have focused on are "including a bit to sit on" and choosing to use "curves" and "circles" with no "straight lines" or "squares". For the "secret stuff" I have hidden parts of the "school logo" in with the hands. The digital files have been sent to Gap Metal, so the parts for the sculpture should be made in the next few weeks, on Thursday I will be visiting the school to discuss the site for the sculpture and to decide on the exact colours we will use, the most popular colour in the vote was red.


The work will be made from four curved uprights with a flat central 'seat' (red in the pictures) section which passes through the lower curved sections to form three 'seat areas' each of the sections will be made up using the hands so of course they wont be solid they will be full of holes. I think that there will also be extra small groups of hands (not shown) bolted onto the main curved surfaces to provide more colour and detail. The fundamental geometry is based on three intersecting circles, every curve is an arc radius of exactly 1m.

Making models

I have been trying out some different ideas for the shape of the sculpture, these are some rough models made with cardboard and masking tape, next I will work on the computer to develop these some of the ideas in CAD (computer aided design). They will be virtual models in the computer.