The Wax
So, in my first week at the foundry I have been experimenting with working directly in wax. I’d discussed this with Helaine Blumenfeld over christmas, and we agreed this would be a good way to settle in to the foundry at the start of the process, that wax might be an interesting medium for me, and with the aim in the next week or so to create something that I could then take through the whole lost wax process.
I had developed some ideas I wanted to experiment with. These were related to recent reading I’ve been doing – Collapse by Jared Diamond (a fascinating account about why certain civilizations failed and some were able to survive – when faced with changes in climate and overexploitation of their environment) and Six Degrees by Mark Lynas (a graphic account of what we think will happen with each degree of global temparature rise).
So my ideas are around man’s interaction with our environment: erosion, deforestation and climate change. I think other ideas influenced by the recent Haiti earthquake – plate tectonics, volcanoes and earthquakes, seem also appropriate given the nature of wax and bronze casting.
I have included some images of my first wax experiments.
At times it has been exciting and rewarding, at others a bit frustrating. Back in england I had been playing with ideas of erosion using plaster, which really lends itself to this. Wax is different, and can have a slight tendency to look plastic when I melt and drip it. But I’ve discovered a point when cooling from melted that I really like using. And i’ve starting finding some ways of working the wax to create forms and textures that are begining to work.
In parallel to the wax texture experiments, I have also been casting some small tetrahedron men in black modelling wax, and starting to put them together. I thought it was going to be too small to cast in bronze, but the foundry have said we can try.
Helaine came to the foundry this morning to see my first week’s work, and especially liked the 3 experiments I’ve included in the images here. Her feedback was really interesting and useful (this was on top of a great chat I had with her yesterday afternoon at her studio).
One of my experiments was a large relief map of Italy that I had done – I felt I was referring to the renaissance tradition of the bronze baptistry doors in Florence, and to the influence of italy and being here on me. However, I wasn’t sure where I had gone with it – it became very decorative, and I think I had got too attached to this. I then wanted to try to work into it a man’s presence, but it didn’t seem possible.
Helaine responded by remembering what Knut Steen had said to her when she was starting off (and had lots of energy and ideas):
“Its a great idea, but its not a sculpture”
I am really excited and energised by the process of this residency. It is very hard and probably not necessary here to capture what I have started to learn from my 2 chats with Helaine. However, I feel on the verge of a breakthrough, that I am beginning to see things differently.
One of the things I’m begining to see differently are my ideas – I think I’m being too literal with how I put them into practice, that I’m too tied to them.
Often I have big ambitious ideas – that I start to form, then there is so much work going into creating this initial vision that this absorbes me totally and I haven’t left room to requestion it, letting it change, be spontaneous and develop. My humanosphere has been an example of this, but perhaps this has also been a result of my change in work process since motherhood. In a lot of ways it has improved, I feel I’ve been procrastating less, getting on and pushing through with work, but I think I may have lost a bit of the re-questioning and looking that is so important.
Helaine picked up a pair of my figures and placed them on my small island – it looked amazing, and we both smiled. In some ways this was what I was intending with these different experiments, but somehow I hadn’t thought to bring them together yet!
With this small action she has set me off in a new exciting direction of experimentation…
