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Plumb Bob

Plumb Bob is a whimsical abstract sculpture that looks somewhat like a mashup of a stick figure, wind chimes, and a fifties diner sign. Created by Robert Hudson in 1982, it is 8 and a half feet high and roughly 7 feet in diameter. It is a colorful assemblage of enamel coated metal, deer antlers, and a mirror. The overall shape is a stick figure upper body with a wide halo balanced around its head and its lower body fused to a triangle that sits atop an ice-cream cone-like base.

The center top mass is matte black steel piping and a ball on top that looks like a stick figure torso. The pipe in the center is topped with a head-like ball and then just below the head, another pipe crosses through and bends down like shoulders and then bends forward like elbows. The “Head” ball has two white rectangular cutouts like eyes, and below them, where a mouth would be, a cube extrudes that is yellow on the end and red on the sides.

Each arm is bent at a different angle so the right arm drops lower than the other. At the end of each arm is a ball formed of three rings that intersect on the x, y, and z axis. Each facet of the ball is colored in pastel primary red, blue, yellow, orange, green, and purple.

Hanging from the left hand by a carabiner and s-hook are two seafoam wireframe tetrahedrons: 3-D four-sided shapes with four triangular facets connected by a shared edge. Hanging from the right hand by an s-hook is a paint-spattered gridded band, like an increasing bar graph that has been wrapped in on itself.

At the top of the sculpture, suspended above the head by a thin rod, is a black L-shaped rod with the long edge horizontal sticking a little past the head, and the short edge hanging down and supporting a wide colorful ring like a hula hoop. The ring is about an inch thick but several feet in diameter and balanced right above the level of the stick figures shoulders. At the opposite end of the ring from the L-shape is a small round mirror that is angled to reflect the ceiling. Right behind the head, balanced on top of the end of the L shape is one deer antler with five prongs. The antler stump has been painted in messy rainbow stripes. The whole structure above the head is balanced so it can be rotated and may not always be in the same orientation.

At the bottom of the stick figure torso, instead of legs, it is fused into a large right isosceles triangle frame turned on end so the hypotenuse is parallel to and behind the stick figure. The triangle frame is a few inches thick and there is also a thinner zigzag that crosses into and out of the hypotenuse. Another deer antler is hooked into the top of the triangle frame.

The lower half of the triangle is fused through the polygonal ice-cream cone shape complete with a dull steel gray dome at the top which the triangle frame pokes through. The cone is a few feet tall and 8 sided. Each side is segmented into different dark-shaded trapezoids: red, blue, orange, peach, green, purple, and so on. On top of the ice cream is a small yellow and red wedge that looks like cheese.

Finally, the bottom of the cone is supported by a half dome created by three intersecting flat discs. The center of the discs are cut out and connected to the cone, they look like the tail fins of a blimp. Some of the base discs are colored with grids, others are shaded with grayscale curves.