Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Back when Clare (of The Lakes Collective) mentioned the project to us, she suggested that I (Ben) might like to build the Jabberwock, and being as it wasn't that long since I'd done some Steampunk-based work, she suggested a Steampunk Jabberwock.
(2 things- the poem, in "Looking Glass" is called Jabberwocky, the monster itself is called the Jabberwock. Secondly, for those who might not know, Steampunk is a genre of Victorian Science Fiction, lots of what-if work based on things like advanced, steam powered technology and lots of blokes with military uniforms and award-winning moustaches, and girls with top hats, bodices, and jewelry made from clock-parts. That's a slight generalisation, and I am a sort-of fan of the genre, but it would take a whole blog post to really explain it, so look it up. The "Brass Goggles" forum is a good place to start).
So having agreed to the project, I then had a slight panic about what to build and how, before visiting every steam railway and industrial museum that the Tories hadn't closed down yet, for inspiration. There then followed a slightly over-long experimental phase of producing masses of drawings and then concept models, which is slightly more in my personal comfort-zone than building a sculpture which would be the end result of the project.
Models were made exploring various different ideas- but the basis of all of them was the idea that a piece of machinery had ended up somehow in Wonderland and had been disguised as a monster by some other creatures. I briefly toyed with the idea of a self-aware monster made of metal, but that was clashing with the logical approach I was taking with designing it.
Its not that far-fetched though, as Alice travels by train over the chess board in an early chapter of the "Looking Glass", so machinery exists there. I explored lots of ideas, like the train as a monster (filtering bits of the pastoral, Victorian machinery-versus-nature debate and Luddite revolts). I was drawn to the idea though of an advanced, self-propelled crane which already happened to look a bit monster like (after seeing a railway breakdown crane with a long neck and dinosaur-like, rearing head at Ingrow station). By some way it had tumbled into Wonderland and some poor downtrodden creatures in the woods had found and commandeered it, making it look enough like a monster to scare everything else away from the woods.
I did lots of different designs combing parts from old models, designs from my own previous Steampunk project, via crane-tank locomotives, harbour cranes, 'Landship' type early tanks, traction engines, and so on.
There then followed a long, long winter of building the final design, which would be a caterpillar-tracked self-propelled crane. It needed to look machine-like, then as if it had been modified to look like a dragon (taking the lead from the original book illustration and prose).
Just to complicate matters, I set myself for budgetary reasons the requirement to upcycle materials for it, and because I don't own my own Hercules and landing strip to transport it, the need to build the finished sculpture so it could dismantle for transport in a normal-sized people carrier.
The ups and downs of the construction will shortly be recounted in nauseating detail on my personal blog http://bensmodel-makingworkbench.blogspot.co.uk/ so sufficed to say that I ended up building it, pretty much to my original design and concept model, and managed to get it transported to the show and set up in the grounds. The original planned location was unavailable, but a better spot amongst the trees was found.
Fully assembled, the monster is about 8 ft tall off the ground, and is primarily made from wood from recycled furniture and model railway baseboards, with some scrap from work. The eyes for instance are modelled on railway locomotive lamps, and are each made from scrap wooden boxes, a bit of extra ply, broken kitchen funnels, and the handles off catering-sized soup buckets.
A couple of the spare Rocking Horse Fly sculptures were included nearby...
...and one of the acrylic test models from that build was included as a 'mascot' on the monster, among the weapons and souvenirs looted from the woods by whoever, or whatever, had commandeered the machine.
A slightly victims-eye view of the monster.
I was quite happy with how it turned out in the end, but by God it was a slog getting it built. As I mentioned above, I will be going into a great deal of detail about all the concept models, the design, the build etc. with many photos and sarcastic cartoons, over on the model making blog, hopefully starting next week.
In the meantime, we've nipped back to Rydal and the battleship-standard construction of the monster has meant it has survived blistering heat, frost, rain, snow, and gales, reasonably well so far. We're back in a few days so we'll post some more photos of the show (including other work by other artists too) over the weekend.
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