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  • Jud Turner - Sculpture Gallery - Duel Nature - 2010
    "'Duel Nature' is my latest 'Impossible Flying Machine' sculpture. It's about the unnatural act of war-making, expressed by heavily arming 2 trees; it's also about the fact that much of what appears to be pastoral nature is also a war between plants for sunlight and nutrients played out very slowly."
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    My work involves the construction of small-scale meticulously detailed models using various materials and objects to create emotive landscapes.

This restaurant features a logo design that looks like a model car kit still on the sprue. I don’t know the story behind this picture, apart from the fact that Brandon Shigeta added it to his flickr set called Tokyo auto salon. The sprues in the design  obviously made an impression on him since he tagged the image with the word “sprues”.  Unlike the other pieces in the series, this design is flatter, but still clearly recognisable as a model kit. I notice that the designer of this piece didn’t make the same mistake as the cover of The Blind Watchmaker, where some letters aren’t actually attached to the sprue and are left “hanging”.

The idea that someone may have created physical products from either the cover of The Blind Watchmaker or the McFly video really tickles me and I’ve searched eBay in vain for both. Designer Demelza Hill on the other hand has created a physical product in the form of “Snap and Dine”, a disposable plastic cutlery set that looks like a model on the sprue. Apart from its obvious practical applications, this is a beautiful piece of art and design.

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Here’s another piece of On The Sprue Art. This one is a wall sculpture from Jellio “based on the sprue element the model parts were attached to” and which “pays tribute to the chrome-heavy hot rods of the fifties.” This piece is large enough that you can probably imagine cutting those components from the frame and pimping out your ride.

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As a child I wondered why plastic model kits came attached to a frame at all; why they hadn’t been removed from the sprue; indeed why they didn’t arrive fully assembled. Whatever the reason, they left an impression on me and I’m still irrationally attracted to designs featuring injection-molded plastic model kits on the sprue. So much so, that I’ve decided to do a small series based on these designs. Part 1 (this post) is about the cover art of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. There seem to be many different covers for this book and some of them relate better to Dawkins’ ideas, but this is the only one that features a model kit on the sprue. The model seems to be two men, a dog, a book and possibly a lectern. I can’t work out what the connection is between the cover and the text – if anyone out there has some ideas, I’d love to hear them.

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