News
Global significance for Stainless Steel.
This gleaming sculpture - Tall Tree and The Eye - graces the Annenberg Courtyard exhibition space at the Royal Academy in London.
The arresting sculpture stands a staggering 15m tall - as high as the surrounding buildings - and consists of 76 highly polished balls that appear to bubble weightlessly up towards the sky. The mirror-like stainless spheres create consistently changing reflections of their surroundings, including of the visitors who throng to the exhibition.
The work is by Anish Kapoor, regarded as one of the most important and innovative sculptors of the 21st Century, and the subject of an exhibition at London's Royal Academy.
A request from afar
However, while the famous sculptor was born in Mumbai and resides in England, the shining globes were manufactured right here in New Zealand. Global Stainless Ltd was asked to create the balls for the sculptor and another New Zealand company, TP Engineering, was given the task of constructing them to form the sculpture. Manager of Global Stainless, Lincoln Raikes explains how a big-city sculpture came to be made in our corner of a fast-shrinking world.
"Global Stainless took its name to heart 12 years ago and began advertising on the internet," says Raikes. "This is not the first custom we have received from overseas. In 2007 we were commissioned to create a giant 2.1 diameter ball for a showpiece in Monte Carlo.
Savvy selling of stainless
"The full story about the internet is really all about Mick Elmes of Engineeronline. I knew about Mick in early days and his engineering background together with his skill and knowldge of the internet at a time when most people hardly knew of its existence and even fewer had computers in their home.
"At this time I knew that we had something really good to offer to architectural artists around the world and the problem was to get it to them. Mick Elmes, also an engineer, saw that we had a marked breakthrough in the manufacture of spheres and he agreed to set up a website, this was about 12 years ago and we have carried this relationship on to this day."
"For this project, Kapoor contacted us having viewed our website and - impressed with our techniques, the finishes we achieved and our costings - had a sample made and flown over so he could inspect it in person."
"Not long after that the request for all 76 balls came through."
Anish Kapoor was most likely taken with the test sphere for its finely polished, seamless finish - this is part of a very unique process developed by Global Stainless. The balls are made from 316 marine grade stainless - after all they are to stand the test of time in a country not really known for its extended stretches of fine weather.
Perfectly formed
"The balls are formed after welding, a novel process that means there is no weld shrinkage - leaving a perfect sphere with no seams and a mirror finish when the process is complete," says Raikes. "The job took us around eight months to complete with five people working on the project at any given time."
From Global Stainless the job moved to TP Engineering, ball by ball, as the manufacturing of each was completed. TP Engineering had the equally tricky job of joining the balls to Kapoor's specifications without showing the connecting elements.
"The balls were mounted on the three masts of 80mm diameter high tensile shaft and bracing of the same size. The balls were threaded on to the shaft and bracing at random positions so that the sculpture did not give away how it was supported and to maintain the graceful look of bubbles coming out of the ground."
Times are not changing - they've already changed!
Besides the unique construction of the balls which no doubt won the day with Anish Kapoor, the other great invention that made the job possible was, of course, the internet. Once the WWW was the domain of techno experts and the elite who owned a computer. But today access to the net is by anyone and everyone. It didn't take a plane trip, or even a telephone call to put Global Stainless under the nose of Kapoor.
All it took was for the sculptor to type the words "sphere", "stainless steel", and "polished" into Google, and then a few short exchanges later Global Stainless' sample New Zealand product was sitting on his front door step in London.
Stainless NZ - New Zealand Stainless Steel Development Association, Issue No.19 Summer 2010
{NEXTPREV_ALT=1,10,0,https://www.globalstainlessartworks.com/modules/SP_News/news.php?view=1&p=[FROM]}