This bench was comissioned as a memorial for Olivia Ray. It resides at her school, Leverett Elementary in Fayetteville AR. It is composed of a steel body with two basalt fiber reinforced concrete wings.

The project began, as most projects do, as a drawing.

We made a swing arm attached to a plywood profile of the bench seat and swung it through a pile of wet sand. Here I am carving the ridges of the wing in the sand with a little piece of sheet metal.

I started by filling the ridges with a black mix. Then I filled in the rest of the wing with various different colored mixes. This is the inside of the underside of the wing. Then comes a layer of basalt mesh, a run of the basalt rebar, a layer of concrete, another layer of mesh, rebar and more concrete.

Here's the final layer going on, in the afternoon light. All of the cement was done in one day.

The frame was made from various sizes of heavy angle iron which was then boxed in with 11 guage sheet. The body of the bug is hammered 11 guage.

The body mounted at the site. The little Kubota made positioning the wings easy. I'm guessing they weigh 600 pounds or so each. More Details