№ 02Process · Toy Trojan · 2019 → 2020
How the Toy Trojan was made.
The frame had to come out of one piece of wood, so the work began in a forest. Months of searching, a three-hundred-year-old mahogany, a ritual to ask permission before the cut, three kilometres out on foot. Then the carving. Then the surface, with the whole present written into it.
Read the brochure · A Visual Essay of the Creation of the Toy Trojan (pdf)
“When they found this 300-year-old Mahogany tree, they carried out a ritual to Mother Nature as permission to cut down the tree and preserve the wisdom and knowledge of the 300-year-old tree.” Studio record · 2020
A gift with something inside it.
The Trojan horse is a gift with something else inside it. This sculpture takes that literally. A horse, at the scale of a monument, finished to read as a toy, and packed, on its surface and through its opened body, with everything a toy is supposed to keep out.
That decision set the constraints. A toy is one continuous moulded thing, so the frame could not be assembled from parts: it had to be cut from a single log. And a single log large enough meant a tree old enough to be worth asking permission of.
One tree, and three to six months to find it.
A team of thirty went into the forest with government permission and searched for a single piece of wood large enough to carve the main frame. The hunt ran between three and six months. What they found was a three-hundred-year-old mahogany.
Getting it out was its own operation. There was no vehicle access, so the log was carried roughly three kilometres on foot across a damp paddy field: around sixteen people to a log.
Asking the tree first.
Before the cut, a ceremony: a ritual to Mother Nature asking permission to take the tree, and asking that the wisdom and knowledge of three hundred years be preserved in what the wood becomes.
A crude horse, cut out of the log.
The first pass is subtraction only: the rearing form pulled out of the trunk in the roughest possible terms, no detail permitted yet. Then sanding, until the whole surface is smooth enough to be drawn on. The main foundation has to be finished before a single character can be placed on it.
A workshop of carvers.
The carving is done by a workshop, working from my drawings and directly against the maquette. The authorship here is shared and stays visible in the record: thirty in the forest, a bench of carvers after it.
Everything the present is made of, carved into one animal.
With the foundation smooth, the surface is drawn on: first digitally over a photograph of the form, then in chalk directly on the wood. Then cut. What goes on is deliberately unsorted: politics and cartoons and video games and gods at the same scale, because that is the order in which they actually arrive.
Political opposites are amalgamated into single heads. Gandhi appears as a saint
as he appears on a ₹2000 note. A figure flees Picasso's Guernica. Kim Jong-un.
Frog Mario from Super Mario Bros. 3. Characters out of Undertale. The Garuda.
The body is opened.
The horse is not solid. Its torso is cut through to a ribcage, and inside the ribcage a phoenix is being born from the pith of the stomach. Below that, death: a skull and the skeletal population underneath. Above it all, the crest: the crown jewel of the Trojan, its imagination and its future, and the narrative it is in the middle of making.
This is where the premise pays out. The outside is a toy; the inside is a birth and an underworld, at the same time, in the same log.
Painted to read as a toy.
The wood is primed dark first, so that the bright hue laid over it carries rather than sinks. The top half is then painted to read as a toy, and the lower half left as wood.
The Toy Trojan, finished.
Hand-carved mahogany, 78 by 30 by 30 inches, standing on a base cut from the same tree.
One frame, one piece of wood.
A search party in a forest. A permission ritual. Government paperwork. Sixteen people and a paddy field. A carving workshop working from a maquette. A surface written like a feed and cut by hand. What survives is the constraint that produced all of it, and the fact that a decision made about form at the beginning turned into a season of work in a forest in Java.
Read the brochure · A Visual Essay of the Creation of the Toy Trojan (pdf)