Celestial Orb.

Routing through a friends long time packed box of possessions I discovered one of her childhood toys. I had never seen this toy before and was immediately smitten with it. I loved it’s malleability. I loved it’s fluidity. I loved its constant shifting and morphing. In fact there wasn’t anything that I actually disliked about it, apart from being quite pissed off no-one had thought to give it to me when I was a child. I went looking for my own personal one, on line and eventually found it via amazon.com (not available in the UK – maybe it is now, I don’t know) I wanted the larger size (8” – oo-er missus) and due to unavailability was forced to buy the 4” one, so really pushed that boat out and bought 2! I showed it to several people who all did exactly the same as me with it – it’s that kind of object, marketed now-a-days as ‘A kaleidoscope for the hands’, it is just asking to be moulded in to continous ever moving and different shapes. I found it incredibly difficult to put down, and although disappointed with not having the larger version found I could put this smaller one on my wrist and lower arm like a piece of filigreed armour. I loved the angles and the patterns each movement threw at me, round and round, distorting it in one place and seeing the entire object react like dominoes falling.

I was discussing my fascination of the Orb (that’s it’s official name) with a friend of mine who happens to be a highly skilled animator, I did not know this at the time and so when I was explaining that I wanted to watch it instead of holding and watching it, he offered to ‘have a go’ at animating it. Several thousand hours later he showed me what he had done. This is (sadly) a reduced version of his work. The full blown high resolution version has so much more detail and is also highly addictive. He took several images of his work and had them printed on to high quality paper, got them framed and they are currently on display at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. His name is Steve. This is my official ‘Thank you’…

Temabina