MAKING SPHERES

The following is an excerpt from Humdinger, the book written by his son of the same name, sharing the REMARKABLE life and work of michael malpass.  

When making a sphere, Michael gently fitted the shapes inside a container that was a half-cut sphere (usually a sea buoy). When the pieces were just right, he would reach in, or almost literally climb in if the buoy were large enough, and weld the metal shapes to one another, but not to the buoy. Michael would lift the now welded half sphere out of the buoy and invert it. He repeated the process to create the second half of the sphere. Demanding grinding, wire brushing, painting and/or polishing steps followed.

The thing people find most extraordinary is how Michael joined the halves to make a whole. People often comment that his spheres are seamless. They are. But so are the welds joining each individual shape to the next. Perhaps just as extraordinary is that Malpass worked from the inside out. An observer could not see what the outside of the sphere was going to look like until it was removed and inverted, but Michael could. It is as if he had the dimensions to a 1,000-piece, three-dimensional puzzle figured out in his head.