Edgar Meyer: Damaged (2008)

Description of Image:

The endpiece of a 4” thick walnut plank had been badly damaged in shipping, with one corner completely shattered. To salvage an otherwise beautiful piece of solid walnut, I used a 3 sulfur atom cluster motif derived from a paper published a few years ago on the imiprobability of protracted amino acid sequence repeats,1 specifically a Cys-Cys-Cys group in one of two PDB entries at the time. I used my program SCULPT to generate the G-code instructions to carve complementary concave and convex shapes and thus remove all trace of damaged wood. The 4” x 8” x 10” sculpture was lightly sanded and finished with polyurethane varnish and is on exhibit at the Wilder Nightingale Gallery in Taos. See other sculptures from the molecular modeling shop of Edgar Meyer at http://molecular-sculpture.com. 1) WWWWhy does Nature stutter? A survey of strands of repeated amino acids; Edgar F. Meyer & John Tollett, Jr. (2001); Acta Cryst. D57, 181-186.