Log in to view the full article
A bell mouth is not the first shape you'd attempt to recreate using wood floors. It wasn't Las Vegas-based sculptor Brent Sommerhauser's first (see our story about his wood floor sculpture "Curl" in the February/March 2011 issue), but it was his second. What is a bell mouth? It's a funnel-like spillway structure. Those spiral wishing wells that kids race coins around until the change falls into a hole in the middle? It looks like that. "I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to get a floor, with all its parallel lines, to collapse that way," he says. Easier thought than done. After a number of CAD drawings, Sommerhauser, with help from his airplane-part-manufacturer brother-in-law, made a plastic model of the bell mouth that was broken into 2¼-inch wide strips. He cut his custom tongue-and-groove, three-layer plywood flooring to the shapes of the plastic strips and locked the pieces together like a 3D puzzle. The finished product took five weeks to make and was as large as a queen-sized bed. He wanted to install the piece into the existing floor to make it look like a real spillway, but the art gallery didn't think that was "practical" (read "safe"). Too bad. Unfortunately, Sommerhauser's work will not be on display during Surfaces, but you can read more about his work on his website at BrentSommerhauser.com.
RELATED: French Artist Gives ‘Floating Floor’ a Whole New Meaning