Month 2 of residency completed and I continue to be frustrated by my progress – however, I’ve started doing some small maquettes and today I’m going to scale one up into a decent size maquette / small sculpture.
When I say small maquettes, they are almost micro maquettes. It is a continuation of the work I was doing in Italy last year, but this time I poured molten pewter into water and got lots of interesting fragments. I’ve selected a few and just mounted them, joined a few together to create other bits, and player around with some ideas.
Two seem to be little beasts or creatures, and I’ve picked one which is about 5 cm high. It seems to be a cross between a weird tadpole and a deformed insect and is also reminiscent of early embryos. I’m not quite sure what it is about yet, but I know it has something special.
So, now I need to decide… how big shall I make it, what material, and should I try to use an internal armature or use a back iron to keep it flexible. I had a bit of a bad night last night waking twice with acid reflux (the joys of pregnancy) then again from a nightmare, before being woken by a coughing 3-year-old at 5am. Its now nearly 11am, and I’m a bit foggy, but maybe just want I need to let go of worries and just throw myself into this piece…
In other news – James my assistant is settling in, and we have nearly finished moulding and casting a commission I had to complete. It took us 3 days to make a reusable mould in rubber with a jesmonite jacket, and 2 days to make the cast (cold cast bronze), we did the squeeze (putting the 2 halves together) on Wednesday. On Monday when he’s back in, we’ll open it up to find out if it all worked ok!
