High Five 

High Five        found porcelain, chain       5"X12"X12"        2012

As an artist one is always aware that you are collaborating with your media, but when your media has a strong anthropomorphic personality you become acutely aware of the team effort. I had been ignoring the Twins for about seven months after originally purchasing them to be part of the Hobson's Choice series. Like all relationships there was an initial fascination, but developing the text for the Hobson's pieces usually takes quite a bit of listening on my part, and frankly they weren't saying anything that I found particularly interesting, so I tucked them away.  

I was pressuring Tiny The Elephant to participate in Hobson's too, but when the opportunity to work on the IONS research came up, I decided we should work on that instead.  During one of the experimental trials Tiny gave me the idea to stop ignoring the Twins, and while I was getting them out of storage I dropped one of them, snapping the head off in three pieces.  Suddenly they were interesting again!  The idea for High Five was already in my mind before I had found all the pieces.  While I chased down some high speed dentist's burrs to drill through the porcelain, the Twins and I spent some quality time together and the text for the multiple choices finally came.  So in addition to High Five, the Twins also make an appearance in Hobson's Choice.

Installation shot of High Five with Vigil in the background. 

In-process picture a taken to help  work out the position of figures and the chain lengths.  Note the blue putty used to temporarily fix the chain in the figurine's hand.