Woven Sky, Woodford, 2013
Woven Sky was born out of a collaboration between Taiwanese sculptor Wang Wen-Chih and Cave Urban. Built for the 2014 Woodford Folk Festival, the sculpture makes use of 70 radiata pine trunks and 600 poles of bamboo, all harvested within a 20km radius of the site.
Wang Wen-Chih views each of his works as an exploration of life, death and rebirth. As breathtaking and substantial as his giant woven works are, he accepts and works with the reality that they are ephemeral. Appropriately, the 80m-long Woven Sky stood as the awe-inspiring entrance to the Amphitheatre, with more than 5000 revellers amassing to witness the festival’s headline acts and the opening and closing ceremonies.
Director Emma Hudson captured the creation of Woven Sky, through an excellent documentary that received early invitation to the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs. It captures the energy and love that was invested by all party's into the creation of this work. We owe Emma a great thanks for this beautiful work.
Artist: Wang Wen Chih
Client: Woodford Folk Federation
Dimensions: 10mx50mx16m
Location: Queensland, Australia
Cave Urban Team: Nici Long, Juan Pablo Pinto, Jed Long, Lachlan Brown, Alice Nivison, Ned Long.
Engineering: Event Engineering
Wang Wen Chih - Artist
Born in the high mountains of Chiayi County, Taiwan, Wang Wen-Chih describes his process as a “borrowing of ancient forms and creating a way of being inside nature.” His work has been exhibited at the 49th Venice Biennale, the 2013 Setouchi Triennale and the 2007 Prague Quadriennale to name just a few. Getting Together 2015 was a civic commission built in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Made from bamboo and clad in local oyster shells.
Title: Getting Together
Artist: Wang Wen Chih
Cave Urban team: Mercurio Alvarado, Seb Guy, Ned Long.
Year: 2015
Location: “Getting together art festival” Kaosiung, Taiwan
Materials: Bamboo & Oyster Shells
Construction
Woven Sky was created over three weeks in the lead-up to the Woodford Folk Festival. This is a remarkably narrow time frame considering the scale of the project. Work was undertaken in often hostile conditions with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees on several days during the process. To describe the building process we have divided it into several key stages, some of which occurred concurrently.
During the building process, Wen-Chih became confident that steady progress was being made thanks to the hard work of his team and the band of highly motivated and enthusiastic volunteers. Due to this headway, the design evolved into a more ambitious project, involving a tallery, more complex domed tower. The process was divided into the following steps: Harvest, Splitting, Planting the Poles and Weaving the Tunnel and Towers.
Harvest
Wang Wen Chih envisions that his works are ephemeral as an exploration of life, death and rebirth. Bamboo is an ideal material for this philosophy as the bamboo harvested was three years old, the envisioned life span of Woven Sky. Sourced from Earthcare Nursery at Crystal Waters, the bamboo species utilized where Moso and Madake to allow for ease of splitting.
The substructure of Woven Sky was constructed from Radiate Pine that had self-seeded across the Woodfordia site. The clearing of these trees, allowed for the regeneration of native bush.
Splitting
With over 500 poles producing close to 2500 splits of bamboo at an average length of 7m - almost 18km of bamboo was woven into the structure. The bamboo was split using an apparatus designed by Wen-Chih that was far more efficient than anything we had ever encountered. Workers would then take each split and using a machete, shave off the sharp edges and nodes to allow for easy weaving.
Due to the varying diameters of the bamboo, splits of different widths were created, that were able to be used in different ways in the sculpture.
Planting the Poles
Once the footprint of the structure had been marked out, a Manitou dug holes 1.5m deep into which the 9m lengths of pine were inserted. Held in place by a combination of crusher dust and earth tampered by out enthusiastic volunteers, the poles would form the base structure of the tower. Horiztontal logs of pine were then woven between the verticals, the lower logs were held in place with batton screws however, little to no fixings were used elsewhere as the tension of interlocking logs kept most of them in place.
Weaving
The style of weaving used in ‘Woven Sky’ finds its origins in traditional basket weaving from Wen-Chih’s village in Taiwan.
