fabrication

This long, narrow fountain was aimed at transforming a building's huge atrium into a relaxing space for its collection of high-stress tenants. Executing the job took creativity, writes Robert Nonemaker -- but it also required detailed planning and monumental, step-by-step efficiency.
Fountain Assets
As a company that's been around for many years in the landscape and pool trades, we knew as we expanded our offerings to include fountain restoration, design and installation that experience and contacts would eventually lead to referrals. What's been unexpected given our past work with mainly residential clients is that fact that our fountain referrals have come in bunches as we work with developers and architects and get involved in
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When second-generation metalworker and sculptor Kris Kesler wanted to take his custom waterfeatures to a higher, more artistic level, he took off his welding mask and picked up a computer mouse. It’s been liberating, he says, enabling him to design everything from simple scuppers to hurricane-proof fountains and take care of the details that make them work on screen before he puts his hands in gloves and goes at it with hammer and tongs.
Where Art Meets Technology
{Multithumb} When second-generation metalworker and sculptor Kris Kesler wanted to take his custom waterfeatures to a higher, more artistic level, he took off his welding mask and picked up a computer mouse.  It’s been liberating, he says, enabling him to design everything from simple scuppers to hurricane-proof fountains and take care of the details that make them work on screen before he puts his hands in gloves and goes at it with hammer and tongs. Growing up in a family of industrial and commercial fabricators, I was steeped from an early age in traditional metalworking techniques – hammering, planishing, leather-sandbag shaping and my favorite, torch welding.  Learning at my father’s knee in his commercial steelwork factory led me to admire the artistry of craftspeople as they transformed raw hunks of metal into functional and often beautiful works of art. The power of that experience has always stuck with me.  Later in life, when I decided to launch my own water- and fire-feature company, I was excited to get back behind the welding mask and
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The works of sculptor David Curt Morris often combine moving water with simple yet striking shapes in glass or metal. His meticulous compositions speak to observers by juxtaposing the kinetic potential of water against static structures – perhaps something as simple as water flowing over glass surfaces – to exploit what he calls the ‘colors’ of water in motion in a philosophy and a design approach that cuts to the essence of what watershaping is all about.
Water in Sculpture
I'm particularly interested in the behavior of water. To me as a sculptor, differing water flows and their textures are like "colors" to a painter:  I find a color that holds meaning for me and then look for a structural form that can present it.  To this extent, my artistic medium is the behavior of water and the means to make it behave.  The sculpture in this case is water combined with a structure in steel, stone and equipment. The work is abstract:  abstractions of feelings related to the movement of people, animals, fish and the flows of water in streams, rivers, rain - even the flow of numbers.  As a result, I need metaphors and feelings to drive my creative expressions, then use water and other sculptural elements in much the same way a choreographer might use line and gesture to express a feeling or a composer will use chord changes and musical phrasing.   My hope is that, in creating forms that are meaningful to me, other
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