Designing and testing a rolling ocean

 

Part of my installation of 100 small fishing boats will include a rolling wave like infrastructure about 1m wide and 2.8m long.  The above photo shows what will be the design to guide the bending of mesh into the wave form/s. You can see I had a few attempts before coming up with a reasonable design. I will anchor the mesh with stone; and might have to create a few props to keep it stable where it is off the bench top.

Over the weekend I completed another 20 boats now bringing the total to 60 - very happy to be past halfway. 

I wanted to test forming the wave form out of mesh. I was able to buy a 6m length of 25mm square mesh. The gauge of the wire was 1.2mm a bit lighter that the 1.5-2mm mesh I will use in Scotland. I laid the mesh out on 2.8m section of a bench in the workshop; and roughly created a wave form.

In the actual installation I want to create the sense of boats sailing up the back of the wave, cresting the wave, poised on the lip of the wave and then crashing into the trough. I attached 15 boats to the mesh - I think the following photos suggest that I can achieve what I'm trying to achieve.

The final form of the wave form will wait until Scotland. In the mean time onwards with making the 40 plus other boats.