The Sculpture Dept at Kansas City Art Institute had an annual tradition of requiring the Sophomore students to create floating sculptures that could contain the artist/designers within/upon them. After 2-3 weeks of planning and construction, the whole sculpture department would caravan out to Longview Lake south of town and each 2nd year student would take turns taking their flotation sculptures for a spin. Juniors and Seniors had the choice to opt into the floatation event if they wanted to, but purely for their own amusement. We’d have a cookout and watch folks float or flounder! My project was a little bit of both.

A person could go solo or collaborate, and I chose to go solo and got close to making a floating sculpture with structural integrity by cutting apart tires and bolting them together in different ways under tension. I failed to properly account for torsion and the structure collapsed once on site. I opted to make my floatation a performance about failure and “played dead” while taking a nap as my collapsed shrine held me down like a weighted blanket.

One curious side note was that as I was thinking about the hexagonal structure that naturally occurs by placing circle shapes adjacent to one another, I started thinking in 3’s and 6’s to the point that the first original song that I wrote on a guitar was an instrumental waltz that I performed during my in-progress critique. It didn’t help me make a better structure, but the vibes felt right at the time.

— Andy T