Rusted metal bower

For quite sometime I have wanted to create a rusted rod bower similar to those made by the the Satin Bower Birds in our neighbourhood. Of course the birds use twigs - much more organic and ephemeral.

After building the house we had a reasonable amount of rusted reinforcing rod that the builder was going to throw in the rubbish tip. Of course I rescued it and it has been continuing to rust away nicely. I decided to construct the bower as part of the body of work I am making for the Lucas Parklands exhibition in June.

As you can see from the photos the project started with a lot of random length rods bent to different angles using a fence post to create a reasonably consistent sized bend. The rods all had to be tied together with rescued rod tie wire - I wanted the whole thing to have an organic feel about it - welding it together would make it too engineered.

The other two photos above show where I have managed to get so far - the bower is basically finished - but it needs fine tuning as they say - that means straitening, more tying etc.

I plan to make some enameled blue pieces for the base of the bower. The photo with the sun shining shows off the colour of the rusted better.