Pietrasanta Bronze Casting Residency 2010

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…

Yesterday’s fair in town was great, I learn the following:

– When buying a sandwich I’ll get asked if I’m married

– Its ok to carry round a 3 foot axe, as long as the head is in a plastic bag

– Shinny black puffa jackets are *the* fashion item – I saw a family in which not only the 5 year old, but also a 1 year old in a buggie, were wearing matching shinny black puffas to go with their mother, aunt and grandmother!

I also bought olives and dates and dried apricots and a melon and a big plait of Garlic, and the local speciality buiscuits – which are like mini crispy pancakes. But I resisted getting a vegetable grater/slicer, a quad bike or a robotic donkey who waged his head from side to side energetically.

They work 10 hours a day in the wax room in the foundry: 7-12 and 1-6, it’s a long day. I supposed it is ok if you are doing the work most of them are doing; quite relaxing touching up of the seams on the waxes. I don’t think I’ll be able to do 10 hours of creative work a day, but it might be interesting for my stamina to try! Most of the other departments finish at 5pm – maybe because they do more strenuous work… I saw them do another ‘pour’ today – or as they call it ‘La Fusione’. It is amazing, the colour of the bronze and the sound of it as almost glugs down into the moulds.

I also had a great lunch – I met Julia Vance (www.juliavance.no): a great Norwegian Sculptor who comes from a lettering background, and now works in marble. She still uses letters a lot in her work and it has an interesting aesthetic that seems to be all about proportions, spacing and balance. She took me to ‘croce verte’ (green cross, I thought she was taking me into the local hospital!) which is a place where they do cheap lunches for the needy (and artists). You have to become a member, which I might investigate. You can get a 3 course meal with water and wine for 9€s. As we arrived she met another Norwegian sculptor Håkon Anton Fagerås (www.fageras.com), along with an Italian Guiliano Corelli (who works at Shakti Studio, where you can just use/rent the space, near Hakon’s Studio). We had a great lunch (I had Macaroni di Mare and Insalate) talking a mix of Italian, English and Norwegian.

After lunch Hakon invited me to the marble studio where he works. It is run by Marco Giannoni and they do a lot of work for artists. Hakon is working towards a solo show in Oslo in March, and had just finished a stunning sculpture of a man balancing. The marble had such an amazing quality – it was a little bit grey but luminous and soft, and he had left the surface with the marks of the chisel, which meant just a very slight texture, and a trace of how he had worked the form. The pose was simple yet very powerful.

At lunch we had been discussing the different emphasis of conceptual artists (who work in the realm of ideas and leave everything to the artigiani), vs artists who care and are involved with the detailed aesthetic and form and the decisions that arise as a work progresses. This seems to be a topic that comes up a lot in Pietrasanta, as many artists have their work made here – for e.g. Marc Quinn (who actually seems to spend a lot of time here), Damian Hirst, Kevin Francis Gray (who has his work done a Marco Giannoni’s where I was).

But my first trip to a marble studio had a big effect on me, it was almost as if ‘marble’ had caught my eye, flirted with me, and I kind of felt excited and exhilarated by what it might offer. I definitely would like to have a little ‘go’ at marble whilst I’m here. I know I’m here for the bronze casting, but in a city so full of talk of marble it would be a shame not to make the most of any opportunities I can find.

I then had a great afternoon back in my cosy wax room, finishing off my Italy relief and starting a new experiment in ripping and dripping wax – but I must go into my first week’s wax experiments in more details in another blog post.

First impressions of Pietrasanta

So, its Wednesday morning and I’ve finally had a chance to catch up on sleep and reflect on the last few days. Today is a festival – the patron saint of Pietrasanta – so the foundry is closed and this beautiful town is apparently full of stalls (I’ll be off out to explore after this post).

The journey down was ok but quite tiring. My brother was a star and came with me to share the driving. We had snow and freezing conditions, the salt spray from the roads made the windscreen filthy. I’d cunningly forgotten to put the antifreeze in my windscreen wash so we had to stop occasionally to clean the windscreen so we could see where we were going. But it was a stunning route through the alps and the Gottard Tunnel.

We arrived Sunday afternoon and Valentina very kindly met us at the Autostrada exit, to show us the route into town as it was the first day of Carnival and there were street parties and people in fancy dress all round Pieatrasanta. Amazing to arrive in a stunning medival city, and see people wandering around as furry animals, or children with hats almost twice their size.

After Valentina showed us round and we’d managed to empty the car, we wandered around the central square which had an exhibition of large marble sculptures which was coming down the next day, we had a drink at a bar on the square then an amazing 3 course meal at ‘il gato nero’ – i.e. starters, pasta, and main course, I looked longingly at the pears poached in wine, but just didn’t have any space for it.

The next morning I had fun driving my brother to Pisa and getting lost, but managed to make it back to meet Valentina at 11. After a brief chat to the guys dismounting the sculptures in the main square (I loved the fact that the main guy had a belt with buttons controlling a crane, which he still continued working as he caught up with Valentina) she took me to the foundry.

The Fonderia Artistica Mariani is amazing. Having visited a few dark and dusty foundries under railway arches in London with slightly ‘heath robinson’ techniques, I thought I had an idea of what a foundry was like. Mariani’s is housed in a 2 storey factory type building, with windows on both sides upstairs and high ceilings, which make the wax rooms on particular lovely light rooms in which to work. Everything is highly organised and tidy. It is full of works in various stages of completion, all neatly arranged either on shelves or the floor.

First we went upstairs to the wax rooms – in the first room I entered, large rubber moulds were open, and about 3 artigiani were painting on layers of wax – an first outerlayer of softer moddeling wax in red or black, followed by a thicker harder brown wax for strength. In the next room, the wax sculptures were out of the mould but now suspended in a framework of steel bars, and they were having runners and risers added, and in the third room, all the seams and imperfections were being removed. This third room is where I am starting work (but more of this later).

Downstairs we saw sculptures now encased in the ceramic shell, standing in lines like white ghosts waiting to go into the kiln for firing and melting out of the wax. Then in the next room I saw them doing a pour – the amazing colour of the bronze as it goes in. Nicola, the son of the owner who was taking us round, showed me the sheets they use to record all the details of each pour – including the weather and humidity. It all seems far more scientific as they continually strive to improve the technique. I’m wondering if I could do some work linked to their processes…

Then we saw the two rooms where they bronze pieces were worked – a room for small pieces where artigiani were grinding and polishing pieces, then an amazing room full of giant sculptures being put back together after having been cast in sections. The final area was for patination, where I saw a huge head which was a bright electric blue (copper sulphate I think) in an intermediary step of the colouration process.

As I’m out of time and space, I will tell you more later.