Studio Days- GEARS!

March 19, 2014 Jodi Sharp

Started a new project the last few weeks. Since I've been working with glass for a while I've been super interested in light. As well as light I've been interested the idea of getting some of my glass works to move, which has made me interested in shadow and projection.
So, NEW PROJECT TIME!

I'm very much in the experimentation stages, but here are the sketches and experiments I've got so far-

How am I planning on making things move? Gears! I've always been interested in learning the mechanics of basic machinery, and I also had the thought that if I made the gears out of something clear I could put images on the gears that would rotate and intersect.

I've been interested for a long time in making my performance imagery animated, so I'm curious to see what would happen if I built a machine that would make it move and shift.

First step- cutting gears out of plexiglass on the laser cutter!

So cool.

Although figuring out the teeth size and all that of the gears was fairly complex (although thank you inkscape) the laser cutting was so simple. And now I have a ton of gear pieces to mess around with!

Here's experimental running test number 1!

Weeeeee! Fun times!