It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally finished the final element of the four: Earth.

To be honest, I found this the trickiest one to conceptualise. My first idea was of a snow-capped volcano (think Mount Fuji), but that didn’t seem very challenging in terms of coiling structure, though I could have added folds and ridges to make it more interesting.

That led me on to thinking about geological strata and layers of rock, and while looking back at photos from a holiday in northern Spain last year, I realised that such layers didn’t necessarily have to be horizontal.

So for a change I decided to make a piece that involved side-to-side coiling rather than going round and round.

Because I started at the side consisting purely of diagonally vertical uprights before looping round to join the two sides together, the piece would not stand upright to start with – it kept overbalancing. I had to trust that as I added more layers to the looped side the extra weight would keep the whole work stable. Fortunately, it did!

And here’s the set of all four elements together.

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