Mining
The initial stage for this was to use cardboard disks of decreasing size, covered in oil based clay and then varnished to create the initial mould for this:
I then created a plaster mould from this:
I then painted the two halves of the mould with hot wax, then another layer, then joined them together and poured wax around them to get a thick coating but keep them hollow.
I then textured the “seem” with a pointed metal tool and added lines and other map based marks using a lino cutting tool.
After shelling up the piece, the wax was melted out:
And then the shell was cooked and the bronze poured in:
Apart from a dimple in one area (presumably caused by the metal contracting as it cooled?), the cast worked fairly well.
I tried adding gold using the keum-bo technique but that didn’t work, so I patinated in black, green and white and polished the seam area to make it shine before waxing.
I also made a couple of smaller pieces modelling the shape directly out of wax. The roughness of these smaller pieces worked better than the more regular large piece, which looks too much like a doughnut.
I then needed a suitable base to support the pieces and decided that burnt planks of wood would work well.
The final pieces:
‘Bell pit 1’
15 x 10 x 25cm
Bronze, wood
‘Bell pit 2’
7 x 4 x 13cm
Bronze, wood
Hand
For this sculpture, I made a container out of lino, taped together and fixed together and sealed to the base with mod-roc plaster bandage:
Unfortunately, the first of these I made too wide, so there wasn’t enough alignate to cover my hand in a flick position, so I changed my hand into a fist quickly before it set.
On the second attempt (fortunately I had only used half the packet on the first one), I made the container thinner and was able to get it to work:
After extracting my hand (easier said than done with both of these!), I then filled the cavity with wax (pouring it out when I thought it would be thick enough):
The fist cast didn’t work fully as there was a hole under the fingers and it was a bit short, so apart from casting it in wax, this is where that attempt ended:
The ‘flick’ cast worked better and so I capped off the wrist, added a post to the finger end to insert into the base and sprued it up to be cast:
The casting worked well apart from a funny area on the palm of flashing(?).
Once tidied up, I chose a brown patina and mounted the hand on a wooden post knocked into the garden.
‘The flick 2’
19 x 10 x 120cm
Bronze, wood