Sven Christian [SC]: Thank you for sharing all those images. It was really cool to look back and get a glimpse of your process, not just in the making of the maquette but the larger work. It’s really useful to have that documentation. I think you can learn a lot from seeing those process images. For example, the shots of the maquette in situ — you can see how you’re imagining it in the landscape when scaled up. Because it’s shot from below, it looks a lot like some of the actual installation images.

Beth Diane Armstrong [BDA]: It’s remarkably like the actual sculpture, when you don’t realise how big the grass is in relation. It’s quite amazing to compare the image of the maquette in the landscape and the image of the big sculpture at that angle.

SC: I don’t imagine you were replicating the maquette verbatim?

BDA: To make the big work I had to measure the maquette very intricately; from pieces that were circular through to a big oval and then all the banana-like shapes. I had to pre-laser cut a specific amount of them, so I did count and try to predict every angle, every length. The maquette is very dense, but I went into it as intricately as I could and measured the length of each pole, estimating the radius and noting the diameter of the dot on top, so there was a huge amount of calculation involved, because you can’t afford to just buy as much steel as you wish. You could buy 10,000 pieces and only end up using 300, you know? That’s just a very inefficient way to spend time and money. I worked it out very well, because I only had a handful of pieces left over.

Most of my other largescale works have been even more precise, because Surface Weight (2013) was my first largescale work. Trying to work out the radiuses was really challenging. The steel arrives with about seven different radiuses. When you look at the maquette, all the curves of the steel are the same, so I was surprised to realise that there were so many different radiuses in the steel. I think the short pieces have a tighter radius and the long arms and legs are much looser. It goes out concentrically. The radius of the medium- length arms and legs sits somewhere inbetween.

SC: That must have taken forever.

BDA: Most of my process does, but that kind of nitty gritty really gels with the more analytical and logical parts of my personality. I really enjoy that rabbit hole. I enjoy reams and reams of nonsense calculations. Obviously, there’s some level of maths involved, but it’s my own type of logic, my own systems and formulas. For each sculpture, there are books and books of serious writing and calculations. My personality seems to thrive on that.

SC: Was the maquette for Surface Weight created in the same way, or was it made on the fly, with the calculations starting when you needed to figure out how to upscale it?

BDA: What’s so beautiful about the making of the maquette is that, before coming to NIROX, I was working in my home studio, sculpting a flat surface with my dot-dash patterning. I sculpt the dot-dash upside down and then flip it around. In my studio I had forgotten to put anti-splatter spray on the surface that I was welding on, so the bits of mild steel got stuck to the surface. When I picked up this flat surface, the steel distorted and the surface became as it is in Surface Weight. At that stage, it was just the first layer of bits and pieces, so it was quite short; this little cluster of dots and dashes. I was so angry, because I’d had a vision of this flat surface. I threw the sculpture across my studio and it hit the wall. Like, I’m not an angry person, but I was very upset because I’d been working for a long time on this piece. I wasn’t throwing it out of anger. It was more throwing it to be discarded, like, ‘That’s the end of that, time to start again.’

For my residency at NIROX, I brought anything in my studio that was unresolved — something that I could tinker with and see if I could push it somewhere. Now I’ve got this undulating surface and I decide to add depth to it, height (all the medium and longer pieces), which became the maquette. So, initially, the making of the maquette was complete chance. My studio was my mom’s garage, which is very small. At NIROX, I had that really large studio by the water, the Cool Room. I’ve always dreamed of having more space. Then I found myself totally overwhelmed by it. I couldn’t work efficiently. I didn’t know what to do with the space. I was feeling almost claustrophobic in so much space. Initially I wasn’t productive. I have this idea that I have to always be highly productive. I was very frustrated with myself. Then, as my time at NIROX wore on, I started dreaming; allowing myself to just dream about what I could do with space. Eventually I taped up what ten times the size of that maquette would look like. I made a rectangle in the room that was 4.3 x 1.5 x 2.7 metres. Then I had this rectangular block, and it was the first time in my life that I fantasised about making something big. That was a really big springboard in my mind. So NIROX was definitely the place where I first dreamt of doing anything bigger than just a small sculpture. Then I spoke to Benji [Liebmann] about this fantasy. That’s how it started.

SC: Did you also construct it in the Cool Room?

BDA: No. My time at NIROX ended and Benji found me three patrons to help pay for the materials and expenses of making the sculpture. Then I came back and made it on the De Witts’s property next door, in their workshop. By the time the materials arrived I only had forty-five days to make it. I was staying at a B&B in Krugersdorp, driving through every morning at about five o’clock, working as hard as I could, then driving back late at night. It was really intense. The sculpture weighs between 700 and 800 kilograms, and I worked out back in the day that there are over twenty processes that happen to each pole to get it to look like it does, because a plain piece of steel just looks like a plain piece of steel. I wanted it to look like the steel of the maquette, where each piece has this little bulbous end, from how I tack welded it. The middle looks more silver than the end, too; it’s got this washed-out effect. It’s kind of grungy, whereas the top surface is very polished. I wanted to emulate that, so the final sculpture didn’t just look like plain mild steel. Over twenty processes happened to each pole. That means I moved 700 or 800 kilograms twenty times,. That’ss fourteen tons of steel in forty-five days; picking it up bit by bit, and discounting holding the steel to sand, weld, and hammer it. My back really did break like ten days before the end. My back collapsed, and it looked like it was overs. I had to get it strapped. For the last ten days, I was taking painkillers every two hours. So it was very intense for me. It was a big deal in my career.

SC: Surface Weight brings up a lot of associations for me. From below, I get the sense of something on the move — a centipede or something — but from above it reads a bit like code.

BDA: That dot-dash is a language of mine, in a sense. It’s found its way through such a long trajectory of my career. So it’s like a secret language; my sculpting language. It does almost want to say something, whatever that is, and it always seems to move from density to looseness.

SC: Do you start on one side and work your way across?

BDA: There’s no actual structure in the structure — no long pole holding it all together. It’s supported by triangulation, so one pole is always touching two or three others. When every pole is touching two or three poles the whole structure becomes incredibly strong. To make an oval, you cut the pole at a sharp angle. A dot means the pole is cut square, in a sense, and a dash is a half pipe that is just more decorative on the surface. To hold down a dash you have to drop some form of oval so that it touches the dash, but to anchor the oval you usually drop a flat circle.

The whole time I’m looking at the sculpture from the top, obviously, and the whole time I’m very aware of the pattern that is forming, because I can’t see the sculpture upside down. I only see right at the end, so the whole time I’m looking at this pattern and I’m aware of where I’m dropping all my dots and dashes, and that I’m moving from a density to a looseness. Every time I drop a dot or dash I need to make sure is it growing in lucidity, in density, in looseness. There are all these things in my mind. The placement and angle of the dashes have certain rules, in terms of how they can and can’t relate to each other, so that in the end they make the overall pattern. If I did it some other way I’d get some other pattern, so it’s all about triangulation; trying to create this pattern that I’m only looking at from the top with all these poles in my face. You’ve got to have x-ray vision and imagine from underneath, what it’s going to look like.

SC: Talking about moving from a density into something more loose sounds quite organic, in the way that one might find fractals in nature, or how something moves and evolves with time, like a root system that’s looking for the path of least resistance. When wood turners make bowls and so on, they often create this very polished surface that shows all the marks of the tree... It reminds me of the top, polished surface of your work, and I guess the title, too.

BDA: Yes. Back then, I was very interested in Douglas Hofstadter. At one stage I was enamored with the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979). I’ve actually lost my copy. I think I lent it to someone who doesn’t give books back. Anyway, I think I came across the title when reading Hofstadter’s work.

During my time at NIROX, I went for a walk with a couple of people. We were by a cave and it was explained that I was standing on what was once the roof of the cave, and the floor was very much beneath me. It made me think of how the tectonic plates and earth are always shifting, and how there are these big seismic things happening all the time in the world that we aren’t really aware of.

It makes me think of the mind, which is very similar. There is a lot of depth and weight to us, but most of the time we grapple with the surface of things, you know? The surface of this conversation, for example — both you and I have things going on in our depths about this conversation; there are always things running about in the unconscious and the subconscious, and they’re always moving stuff about. That’s also true of other things like weather systems or the economic state of the world — everything. As humans, we can only really grapple with the surface of things, and so, in the sculpture, I wanted to purposefully push the surface (which is the most alluring part) out of reach.

The only way to see that shiny, enticing surface is at a distance or from directly beneath, because it’s just taller than a human. Now you’re dealing with the weight of the sculpture and how that makes you feel, because it’s got these piddly little legs and it feels very top heavy, so it’s a bit imposing. It feels precarious. And you are confronted with 700, 800 kilograms. On a personal level, I needed to deal with physical weight. I was ready for it and I needed to deal with a lot of emotional, unconscious processing, which I did a lot of making the sculpture. Half breaking my back was part of that process. I think I needed to go through that.

When Trent [Wiggle] came to pick the sculpture up, he picked it up, to get it on the truck, and it was the first time that I’d seen it upside down — for the first time I’m confronted with the thing that I set out to make. I’m a very OCD person — I’ve got clinical OCD; it’s what feeds my art in many ways — and I remember going out of my mind because after the work was placed and the truck left, I got it into my mind that the sculpture needed to be moved two to five meters to the right. I freaked out. I was besides myself. I can’t remember who was there at the time, dealing with me, but it took me a while to realise that what I was actually freaking out about was my sculpture. My sculpture freaked me out.

Up until then, I had been making it upside down, and I was fine with that, because I can deal with it upside down. It’s all manageable in my psyche, and although I’d set out to be confronted by the weight of the surface, there it was for the first time, you know? It got flipped over and now I’m dealing with this imposing, top heavy thing, and I, along with everyone else, saw my sculpture for the first time. It was such a sublime moment.

SC: How did the experience differ from seeing the maquette? Was it because of the scale? I imagine you would have seen a version of it in the maquette, so what was it about the large version that took you by surprise? Was it the scale?

BDA: Yeah. It was my first big sculpture. Upside down it felt so small. All the weight was on the floor. There were just these thirteen or so little legs in the air, and because I had been intricately involved with it for forty-five days, I knew it like the back of my hand; I knew every single inch of that thing. It was incredibly familiar. When it got flipped over it became this totally foreign body. Suddenly I didn’t know this upside-down thing and it was very big and weighty.

SC: Like that sense of getting lost in a forest? I imagine it’s similar to how, from the outside, if you’re looking at a small model of a forest there’s a sense of control, but when it’s big and you’re inside it and you’re holding one pole and there are five others around and you’ve actually got to navigate it, physically ...

BDA: Absolutely. It’s like, ‘Wow!’

SC: I’ve heard people talk about that experience with printmaking, and the top surface of the work does actually read a bit like some kind of impress.

BDA: Oh, I’m sure! I actually just got goosebumps. It’s similar in that there’s so much process and then finally the thing.