Pietrasanta Bronze Casting Residency 2010

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.

I’m leaving in the morning

So, after 3 months of preparation, and the feeling that life has been on hold for a while, I’m leaving tomorrow morning for italy.

I still feel like my head is full of admin and practical things, and I’m looking forward to being in the apartment in Pietrasanta and taking a breath and reflexion before I start at the foundry on monday.

So – I decided to drive to Italy so that I could take lots of tools and toys and things with me. Decamping half my studio along with the nursery has been a bit of an epic task. I have all the bags, including for my mother who’ll be joining be later, pilled up in the corner of the room, so tomorrow morning I’ll pack up the car and leave by 10. Eurotunnel around midday, France by 2.30 local time, then about 6-7 hours driving to somewhere near the alps called mullhouse for an overnight hotel stop. Then on Sunday another 6-7 hours to Pietrasanta. This residency it definitely turning into a family affair: I’ve persuaded my Brother to help me drive down there, as my husband is left ‘holding the baby’ on his own. Its very kind of him, and unfortunately he has to be back in london for work on tuesday so he’ll be flying straight home on monday lunchtime!

Useful things for others planning a residency in Europe:

EHIC: european health insurance card, can be ordered easily online from here: http://www.ehic.org

Car insurance – some companies only have 60 days or european travel included as standard, but a few have 90, so its worth shopping around. I’ve had to cancel my existing policy and take out a new one, which I had to do before I left the UK. I haven’t found any company prepared to do more than 90 days (and my residency finishes in about 92 days time) so I may have to drive the car back, then fly back for the last week…

I have been posting ads online, and pinning up posters, but I still haven’t found someone to sublet my studio. I one person going to see it on monday, so fingers crossed… I’ve also decided that someone needs to set up a website or mailing list for artist studio vacancies, as there is nowhere (as far as I have been able to find).

The places I have posted:

Arts Admin mailing list (needs to go in the lonely art section): http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/contacts/edigest/edigest-post.php

http://www.cida.co.uk/

Artelier – the artquest studio swap service

I tried posting to artnews (http://www.artsjobs.org.uk/) but it didn’t appear on the newsletter, so I guess they won’t post studio vacancies.

Also tried to post here, but never got my account approved: http://www.creativespaceagency.co.uk/noticeboard

Anyway, last minute packing calls, I will try to post again once I get to Italy.

Briony

Little things, big things and problems of unknown size…

I have been working on my Enzyme project – and am getting quite excited about it. However, I’m also aware that I don’t want it to take over totally so I leave room for other ideas and experimentation with all the bronze casting techniques. With a view to this, I want to limit the size of the enzyme sculpture – but this is a little bit more complicated as I can’t go too small on the figures or they won’t be castable. I think the limit is 3mm for the bronze to flow properly.

So – I did some research and calculations. A carbon-carbon bond is between 120 – 154 picometers (pm). Picometers are what they use to measure atomic dimensions.

1 picometer is 1/1,000,000,000,000 m (pretty small!)

Most small molecules are measured in Ångströms (Å) which is 100 times bigger than a picometer, for e.g. Water is 3Å.
Proteins and Enzymes are measured in nanometers (nm), which is ten times bigger than an Ångström. So:

1Å = 100pm
1nm = 10Å = 1000pm

A typical globular protein is about 4nm. So, if I made my carbon-carbon bond about 12 cm long (roughly the scale used in my diamond inspired sculpture), then my total sculpture would be 4 meters – which would be quite an undertaking! That is assuming I can find a suitable enzyme that is only 4nm – some might be even bigger than this.

So it I want to reduce the scale of the total sculpture, I could try reducing the scale of my carbon-carbon bond, aka my figure-figure distance. The man in the middle of my tetrahedron has arms & legs of 3.5cm from the centre of the figure. This is probably the limit of how small I can go, as the wrists on this are about 2 x 3mm, and the tips of the fingers are 1mm. I will probably have to wait till I’m at the foundry to find out if I can get away with this. Even so, this would give me a 7cm carbon-carbon bond length, thus a 4nm protein would be about a 2m sculpture – still quite big! Hmm, worrying…

The Interview part 2: Project for Pietrasanta (cont. from previous post)

I then presented my proposed project: to represent an Enzyme

This is an idea for a work I’ve recently had. Enzymes are proteins that are the ‘do-ers’ in all living things, they make all reactions happen – from the breakdown of food, to muscle movements, to reproduction. They are so elegant, have simple forms which includes an active site. This is like a lock, that the ‘key’ (the substrate – i.e. the things that gets changed by the enzyme) slots into like a key fitting in a lock. They are also so varied in shape and size. I showed them an image of an enzyme.

The work has 2 elements which allow me to explore the 2 techniques:

• Molecular construction – i.e. the chemical that fits in the enzyme, to be represented as small figures, like the carbon dioxide except more extensive – to be modelled in wax – that will help me to learn constructed bronze

• Main shape – a large abstract-like form (except it is actually the exact shape of a real enzyme), to be modelled in plaster – that will allow experimentation in texture and patination

Getting the most out of the residency
I once overheard Alexa Holt (of Cove Park) say that a particular artist “knew how to approach a residency” so it had been very successful. I never got to ask her what she meant… How do you approach a residency?

My plan: clear structure, with space for reflection and creativity

Capturing knowledge: how to record? Notebooks + this blog

Getting most out of Pietrasanta – already speak Italian, revise before arriving.

Getting most out of extra time (away from family responsibilities and building career activities) – Ideas diary (daily personal diary, Mike Tyson-esque drawings/sketches of ideas for new work)

Conclusion
I know a lot of people (including my family and at the organisations involved) will be working hard to allow me this opportunity, so I’m prepared to work very hard to make the most of it.

I had presented to a panel of 6 people. They then asked me quite a few questions but were very nice and interested throughout, and they also told me a bit more about what I might expect in Pietrasanta.

I then packed up my maquettes and headed home on a bit of a high after the adrenaline of it. I felt I had done myself justice and it would all be up to who else was up for it. But then I started worrying that I would be up against more experience and talented sculptors, and it all seemed a bit unreal, even more so after I got the call the next day saying I’d got it.

I have since been working on the preparatory work for the project, and I’m off to Oxford next week to look at Enzymes! More of this in another post.