This blog aims to capture my personal experience of the residency as well as being a means of capturing techniques and processes of Bronze casting to act as a resource for both myself and others. The Brian Mercer Bronze Casting Residency is a fully supported scholarship to experiment with bronze under instruction from master craftsmen for three months in Pietrasanta (Tuscany).
Invitation to my Residency Show this wednesday in South Ken in London:
Opening
Wednesday 28 July
6.30 – 8.30pm
Artists’ talks – 7pm
Exhibition continues
29 July – 20 August
Wednesday to Friday (or by appointment)
11am – 4.30pm
Royal British Society of Sculptors
108 Old Brompton Road
London SW7 3RA
This is an open invitation to anyone who has been following my blog or would like to come along.
I’ve been busy getting ready for this. The catalogue in particular has been a little bit painful and lots of hard work, but hopefully it will be worth it.
Tomorrow I go in to help install the pieces. I have made 2 new plinths especially for the 2 enzyme related pieces as I wand to attach the sculptures straight to the plinths and get rid of their bases. So I’m excited to see how they look.
I also haven’t really seen the 3rd piece finished except in photos as I didn’t quite finish the patina stage when I returned to Italy. It is all still a little nerve racking, and hopefully I’ll be happy after tomorrow.
I guess I also need to finish and wrap up this blog at some stage, which would be sad. Maybe I can do another post show posting, so this doesn’t have to be the last one…
Talk soon, and maybe see you on Wednesday.
London London London! And taking stock
The shock of returning from the residency is beginning to wear off. It has been so hectic I can’t believe a month has already passed since I got back. Initially I found it hard adjusting back to the complexity of my life back home. One particular day when I’d forgotten my oyster card made me want to return to my straight forward life in Pietrasanta.
I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learnt from my residency, and a very strong thing is about working method and how to create the climate for me to do great work. In Pietrasanta there is such a strong work ethic. I’m sure this stems from the marble carving tradition and if its going to take 6 months to carve a work, you want to keep putting the hours in. But it really normalises the idea of doing an 8 – 10 hour day, 5 or 6 days a week. I don’t think you are creative for every hour of that, but by putting in those studio hours, you can in some ways take your time to do the work well and push it to its limit.
Since being back in London I had a great chat with a musician/composer friend, and he was advocating that you just need to get the work done. He thought anyone could start something, but not many people could finish. I’m not entirely sure I agree with this, as I used to have that fear of the blank page and I often procrastinate before starting a piece. But I can see what he meant, the studios of many artists, and apparently the computers of many composers, are littered with unfinished work. Once you start something, you need to push it through to completion.
What was great about my residency was that I was working long hours and under pressure which I often do when I am up against a deadline. But the great thing was that I also had freedom if I wanted to experiment, take a tangent or just wait and look at the work some more. I need to recreate these conditions on an ongoing basis. I often worry that only obsessive compulsive people make great artists, which I don’t think I am. But I do love it when I get a little bit lost in my work. Again the musician thought that too many composers did this, and that you could keep changing and rechanging a work, and not realise when its finished.
I think this is an interesting duality, either loosing steam on a piece for whatever reasons (often other pressures and leaving it too long) or over working a piece till it looses its magic. Hmmm, knowing when to finish is an art in itself.
This reminded me of Helaine in her catalogue talking about the theory that you could (or even should) complete a work in a single sitting. In that way, the purity of a single thought or way of looking at your subject matter would come through.
Before leaving Pietrasanta I was fairly clear about the sort of work I wanted to be doing for the next 6 – 12 months at least. I decided that I’d learnt so much from each of the 3 pieces I did in Italy, that I wanted to continue working on the same scale, in a limited number of materials and try to complete at least one new piece a month. This was partly inspired by looking at Yves Dana’s catalogue of work, and in the 80s he was doing 13 – 15 works a year. The obvious way to fund this is that I need to start selling the work, and to look for a gallery. In some ways the scale of work and the style would lend itself to this.
But since I’ve been back in London, I’ve started to wonder whether I want to start heading down that particular route, and whether it will limit my options in future. I feel like I’m trying to create works that really say something, but I feel uncomfortable with the idea of them being thought of as luxury decorative pieces to complete a wealthy lifestyle. However, the only sales I have done I haven’t felt like this. In fact, it was been an amazing process knowing that (my handful of) clients are so taken by my work that they want to live with the pieces permanently in their homes.
So, dilemmas dilemmas.
2 days left!
All a bit exhausted and emotional… Took my mother and son to the airport today, and when I got back to the flat this evening it seemed so wrong that they won’t be back. I’ve been terribly selfish a lot of the time and taken total advantage of my mothers nurturing nature, but I’ve enjoyed our 3 months living our simple lifestyle together. I went to put radio4 on the iplayer and had no-one to ask what to put on. And all the other residents of the apartments say it won’t be the same without my 2 1/2-year-olds cheery ‘hello’ as he run’s around the courtyard and garden.
Boy, does it take a long time to get something cast in bronze! I finished my enlargement in clay before easter, and we’ve been rushing it through all the stages, but it very nearly wasn’t done in time this week:
Wed 31st March – finished the clay
Thursd 1st april – Lorenzo formatory, drives my piece to his studio, and does the first coat of rubber
Fri 2nd april – second coat rubber
Tuesday 6th – Plaster jacket
Wed 7th – long story day missed
Thursd 8th – opened, cleaned, taken to foundry
Friday 9th – cleaned again, prepared and cast in wax
Monday 12th – finished casting in wax, opened up hollow and started touching up inside
Tues 13 & Wed 14 – me touching up wax and sculpting inside of work
Thursday 15 – first thing in morning – we put the beak of the bird back on, and put wax in queue to wait for its sprues to be done. Alfredo did the sprues in the afternoon
Friday 16th April – in the morning I touch up the wax post sprues going on (the metal bars that were used to hold it in place had left holes that needed filling) Then it was waiting in the queue for the ceramic shell to be done.
Sometime the next week, I think on the tuesday, I started getting worried and talked to Raymondo about whether it will be done so that I can touch up the metal before I go, not for the first time, but I think he then talked to someone, so it jumped the queue
Wednesday 21st April – the difficult hollows that are virtually enclosed have ceramic added first, then the wax is touched up again, and the red pins are added which will be where the air and bronze escapes during the pour
Thursd 22nd – ceramic shell layers start, and it dries in the cupboard between layers.
Sat 24th, I have a chat with Nicola about whether it will be finished in time, we go look at in the cupboard still drying, with more layers on. He says he’s not sure if it will be ready to be poured by wednesday or not (eek)
Monday 26th – I pop into the ‘fusione’ room, and my pieces are sitting there, looking like they are done in the ceramic. I ask Enzo when they will be poured: “not sure, maybe friday” was the response I got. *gulp* – why can’t they be done sooner, I ask, explaining about the fact that I’m leaving and want to finish and patina them before I leave. And also that I wanted to show it on thursday evening when I have my little “thankyou, leaving party and show of my work” Festa.
They were going to wait for other ceramic shells to be ready too, as it will be poured ‘hot’ and normally they do a whole crucible of small ceramic shells at once. I start feeling very guilty as I realise how out of the ordinary and annyoing it would be if they do mine straight away. But I do mention that Ivan had rushed the ceramic shells through on their own for me…
I find it very hard to understand Enzo. He wears ear plugs so he tends to talk really softly (worried about shouting maybe?) and the radio’s on loud, so I wasn’t quite sure what he’d said. I saw Nicola as I headed upstairs and explained situation, very gratefully asking if anything could be done.
Tuesday 27th – my shell is fired and wax melted out
Wed 28th (Today!) – it was poured just before lunch, chipped out and sand blasted by 5pm
tomorrow I do the chasing!
Yves Dana – and my catalogue reading
I know I’ve mentioned him before, but today in my ‘pausa cataloga’ (not sure if that is good italian) I read a beautiful book of his sculptures from cover to cover. It felt like falling in love, so exciting and enjoyable, I just wanted to suck it all up…
So, at least once a day I try to spend somewhere between 15 and 30 mins looking or reading the catalogues in the foundry office (today I just got sucked in and it was an hour, oops). I started this about a week ago, but should have done it when I arrived as there are so many I don’t have a hope of getting through them all before I leave. Its nice as it has the added benefit of getting to know the folks in the office better.
The last few days I’ve been reading Helaine’s ‘mythology’ catalogue which is amazing and really useful. Yesterday I read how she was influenced by a writer to who said it should be possible to create a work in a sitting, to work intensely on her models till they were done, and then do very little changes in the process of translation and enlargement.
This was great and timely advice, as I’m currently working on my third piece, and having tried to work it out in a few small maquettes (I think I was working too small and it didn’t really help) I decided to launch into the piece as I am creating a surface related to a group of figures in the geometry of a pyruvate molecule. I initially thought I was maybe missing something by working too fast, and nearly getting it in the first sitting. But following that reading, I’ve decided to try to get it as fast as possible so I don’t go astray or lose it.
Reading Dana today was also useful. His response to his materials – he initially worked in iron, then moved to stone, now also works in plaster for casting in bronze – he is inspired and challenged by the hard materials. I was also intersted that he works on his pieces directly without doing maquettes.
Another thing I noticed was how prolific he was at the start of his career when he was doing his iron works – around 14 works a year, which is more than 1 a month. This has given me the resolve that when I return I really need to set myself a similar aim for the next year. I think I need to get lots of works done as you learn so much from each one. And the size I’ve been working now is fine – 40 – 80cm or so… large enough to challenge but small enough to get done and push to its limit and fully resolve in the timeframe.
So, feeling in a transition phase but in a good way – sucking up the last of what I can from Pietrasanta, whilst beginning to look to the new chapter that will open when I get home.
Meanwhile the doom of the ash cloud seems to be chiming with the work I’m developing!
Pietrasanta’s at last getting warmer – and opening up like a flower…
And with the warm sunny weather its is filling up, foreign artists are arriving, and the ones that are here all year, seem to have come out of hibernation in their studios.
Friday night’s drink in the piazza after work, turned into 8 of us going for a nice dinner, and ended up with 4 of us drinking take away limoncellos or cafes (in expresso size polystyrene cups with lids!) on the steps of the duomo, with one of my party playing the piano accordion. I felt like I was in a film…
Nearing the end
But I only have 2 weeks left, so I feel like I need to make the most of every opportunity and experience. Part of me is also now looking forward to being home, in my own place with my family, and to starting a new creative phase in my own studio.
But I’m also very busy trying to finish my 3rd piece. Today I started in earnest putting the figures into a framework. On Helaines suggestion I had worked on some small maquettes, but in the end decided that the piece isn’t that big, and the structure is so dependant on its interaction with the molecular figures that I just had to launch in to the piece and work it out in that.
I’ve been using pastellos of the hard brown wax. I love making the pastello, and I’m getting quite good and quick at it. I dip my hands in a bit of oil, then pour a laddel of molten brown wax into the basin of cold water. I then start needing the wax together first in the water then soon out of it. There is something so sensual and pleasing of needing the warm wax in my hands.
I’ve had a bit of help from Angelo to construct a framework, but mostly I’ve done it on my own, as the foundry was very busy, with at least 3 artist in either inspecting work, or working on things, and Angelo was running from one to the other with his usual calm – however now that I know him a bit, I could tell that under the calm exterior he was a little hassled by all the different directions he was being pulled in.
I’m excited by the piece, and was gutted when I realised it was already 12 and lunch break. Anyway, back at the flat for a quick lunch, then I can continue with the piece. I’m trying to work intuitively but whilst keeping in mind the ideas and feelings I’m hoping to express.
My mother and son are just back in now, so I’ll stop here.
Briony Marshall is a London based sculptor and installation artist. With a background in Biochemistry she is interested in the idea of art practice as research. She fuses an intellectual/conceptual approach with an intuitive, materials inspired process to develop sculptures that investigate the natural world and man’s place in it. In 2012 she completed the Pangolin London Sculpture Residency which culminated in a solo show at Pangolin London in May 2013. She became a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 2008 and has recently been elected a member of its Council. She is head of Professional Development at The Art Academy and was recently named as one of the ‘175 Face of Chemistry’ to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2015 she was shortlisted as one of the five finalist for the First@108 Public Art Award.
