#plaster casting

Finally finished making Xamora's plaque. Took longer than expected due to anxiety and needing to learn how to work with plaster of paris. It's not perfect but it captured what I wanted it to. I'm looking for someone local familiar with plaster who can clean it up without damaging it.

I didn't find any specific tutorial on how to do this. I started with these two articles to help determine how long to wait for the plaster to set, and used this mixing technique. I waited about 2 min post mixing to set in Xamora and the flowers. Left her in for about 5 minutes but should have gone for 6 or 7 - a few things wound up smudged. Flowers should be removed earlier so the petals don't get stuck in the plaster. Letters shouldn't be removed until plaster has fully hardened - about 25+ minutes.

It's a delicate balance of adding and removing things when it's the right time to get the best impression. Even with all my testing I had issues scaling up - also I think whatever conversion I used to calculate how much plaster I needed was wrong because I made twice as much as I needed for my pan.

I did tests using some old skin I collected - saving good pieces for a future project. I had these silicon molds I had ordered for something else the same day Xamora passed, which turned out to be handy to quickly remove my test pieces.

I also cut up the stamps to get the kerning and alignment right. I needed multiple stamp sets because it all needed to be done at the same time and left to set.

Once this is cleaned up it'll be placed on my wall to forever commemorate my first bearded dragon.

Xamora, though your life was short, it was full of love. I won't forget you.

Additional progress pic below the cut - tw for dead animal.

I'm back with another sculpture! To be completely honest, this one was a real struggle for me to work out, idea wise. I love working abstractly (see earlier pieces!) but for this one our prompt in class was "objects and identity." We were asked to cast an object from life, and use it to speak to some aspect of ourselves that we want to explore. Not only am I an extremely closed book (pour one out for my therapist) but I'm also really not that interested in replicating objects?

So... I sort of cheated. This isn't *really* a cast of VHS tapes (although I did try to do that, and it failed miserably) but I'm still pleased with the outcome. Sound on for what I think is the best part — the pleasing and/or sinister snick snick snick sound of the tape unspooling and piling up.

If you like long, corny artist statements, boy howdy do I have one for you!

~~ GEODE ~~

My day job is as a journalist, and while I find a lot of the posturing that journalists do about our role as storytellers to be pretentious and often egotistical, I also can't deny that I got into this because I love to see into people's lives. Why do people do what they do? Why do we make the choices we make? How did we get here, as individuals and as a collective?

Much of journalism is about the big moments — wars and chaos and game changing plays. But those don't come out of nowhere. They come from a history, both personal and communal. We are products of our childhoods, our cultures, our teachers, our parents. We come from places that have smells and sounds and textures. And we document those things — and here I don't mean "we" journalists, I mean "we" as people. Humans have, for our entire history, recorded ourselves in one way or another. We write on walls, we tell each other stories, we come up with words that have deep meanings that stretch back into time.

Some journalists see their job as speaking truth to power. Or telling the important stories in the face of chaos and misinformation. Or staking a claim to truth, and defending it. All of that is true, of course. But when I think about my job I don't think about those things. I think about excavation. About telling the story in such a way that you can feel the texture of the people in it. I think of stories like geodes.

Do you know how a geode forms? They start with a volcanic eruption. Lava flows from a hot, angry vent, and mixes with the gases in the air. Most of the time, those gases don't stay put — they escape into the air and go off to become the wind in your hair, or carry pollen, or sweep under a bird's wing. But sometimes, bubbles of gas can't escape the boiling weight of the lava and become trapped. As the lava cools, those bubbles remain. It is only then — held tight and encased in cooling rock — that the crystals characteristic of geodes form.

There is something sad about opening a geode. It can reveal a great beauty, but it is also inherently destructive. You are taking a hammer to something hard and protected and asking it to open, to be seen, to be commented on. Not all geodes want to open. Not all geodes should be opened, perhaps. Not all geodes are beautiful inside. How do you know when to break one, and when to leave it be?

Once you break a geode, you open the crystals up to damage. UV light can bleach the colors inside and the oils on your skin can slowly eat away at the glittering growths.

I think a lot, as a journalist, about the stories that we lose when people die. The small things that they knew — the color of a lover's hair, the name of their neighborhood dog, the true identity of a soldier — that go to the ground with them. I have to stop myself from buying home movies when I see them at garage sales and thrift shops — each one, to me, a geode. Inside they might contain nothing, or everything. Wrapped tight in metallic film they recorded things people thought were important, things people wanted to remember. Trapped in plastic and now, broken open.

My piece is a VHS geode. I have broken it, and it is unspooling, and we are forgetting. It is beautiful and terrible all at once.

Here’s a sneak peak into how i cast Silco’s statue 😔✌️

As promised a couple of weeks ago, here is the first attempt of plaster casting with flowers. I chose an Alpine Strawberry plant to make a cast of as I have a garden full of them (the tiny strawberries taste delicious). It probably wasn’t a wise choice as the strawberries were a little squishy to get out of the clay. The strawberry flowers are not very well defined either.

As a way of exploring humans’ relationship with natural processes I really leaned into the visual similarities between bones and the branches I had dipped in plaster. I chose a black background to make these collages on to try and imitate x-rays. From some angles the branches already looked like hands and were quite creepy so I had fun creating more. I think that although they become sort of abstracted at times they still evoke a skeletal feel. 

“Plaster Figure”

I decided to go back to my mold of my wire figure and cast a plaster piece to figure out which would be suited for my next piece.

  I placed the mold on the workbench and balance it between two bags of clay. I mixed the plaster by half filling a bucket with water. I then scooped handfuls of plaster powder into the bucket. I kept doing this until a peak of powder formed and didn't dissolve.

  Next I mixed the powder and water together until the powder completely dissolved. When the mixture was ready I then poured it evenly into the mold/. I left it to dry overnight.