I have to call this sculpture even though it's a little different.
I was working on finding a sculptural medium that would have good working properties and be a durable easy to finish material. I began to experiment with a matrix made of portland cement and a variety of aggregates such as clay, coal ash, sand, vermiculite, perlite and so on.
Since I had to make something while doing this R and D I focused on these axes. For one, they are very simple shapes but in addition they took me back to a time in my youth when I used to walk the farm fields of Chesapeake Bay area looking for Indian Artifacts.
In fact I had an impressive collection or arrowheads, pottery, spear points and Indian Axes. The kind represented here are the 'smooth" axe variety made by grinding and polishing rather than flaking.
I eventually lost my original collection somewhere along the way and this project actually gave me a lot of satisfaction by remembering the beauty and feel of those ancient tools. I used a patina to finish the look and soon had a pretty nice collection of fake axe heads on my wall.
Of course that just naturally led to wondering how they might look hafted onto handles that , of course , I would have to make as well. So back out to the wood shop.
Here are the finished pieces. Pretty deadly to heft and fine to look at . They went up on the wall as well.
Actually I laid them out on the floor for a good picture but here they are in entirety. Well not all, I have several boxes of them around here now, much to the wonderment of my wife and students.