The Nineteenth Hole

The pursuit of a very small sphere, taken entirely seriously.

Modeled from the follow-through of a swing, held at the exact point where the body has finished and the ball has not yet arrived. The wall behind it borrows a geometry the eye reads as food long before it reads as architecture.

Two materials that have to meet exactly. The figure is cast in stainless steel; the wall behind it is cast resin, painted by hand. The work only holds if the spheres sit in their openings without a shadow of play between them.

The wall is therefore cast from the same digital file as the spheres, so that hole and ball are cut from one geometry instead of being fitted to each other afterwards. Tolerance is under half a millimetre. Any more and the eye reads a gap; any less and the resin binds as it cures.

The figure is cast by lost wax in four sections — club, arms, torso, base — welded and chased until the seams close. The swing is held at its end, which puts the whole mass off the vertical and asks the base to carry a load it does not appear to carry. For that reason the plinth is machined from solid rather than cast.

The finish is the artist's: mirror on the figure, satin on the plinth, and the wall painted last so its colour is judged against finished metal. Seventy hours per example.