Large sculptural piece - untitled

                         

                                                                                

                                                                       

                                                     Dimensions - ( H x W x D ) - 107 x 153 x 24 cm

                                    Medium – carved sandstone, clear resin, pigment,  paint, wood

 


I have been working on this piece on and off for four years. I have had the stone pieces much longer and previously I had cast a model of the stone pieces in plaster and carved a similar composition to the one I have now in stone. The composition consists of flowers , a type of lily. But I didn´t want the piece to be too figurative but rather just some natural form that looked fluid.

Some of my colleagues in the workshop thought it looked more like maize than flowers and that´s cool aswell as I had been thinking on the work of  Diego Rivera while working on the piece and my intention was to capture that type of fluidity Rivera has in his fantastic Murals.

The drawing will give you an idea of what I wish to achieve although I am still not completely sure how the final composition will look.

The center and outer pieces are cast in clear resin .

While I love the finish of clear resin when it work out well the process is a killer. It´s toxic , long and laborios. For the central piece above I had to make several silicone molds for the long strips of resin with pigment and another set of silicone molds to go across ways. This was due to the fact that the strips are very fragile and could not be cut to fit the mold. After this a shellac mold was made to creat the shape above and the resin was poured in a series of layers. The process of mixing the catalyst and resin creates an endothermic reaction which results in a slight ´shrinking´of the resin form. 

When the resin has set it´s best to leave for a number of weeks and let it dry completely. After this tit has to be sanded with a huge amount of different graded paper and finally polished with wax a buff brushes. 

The final resin piece is quite strong but prone to chipped or like glass will break easily. I have similar pieces before but this time I wanted all the elements to have a soft finish and the hanging and framing to be completely in wood. Using Japanese traditional methods of framing I began to work on how the pieces might hang.

I finally decided on a system of wooden dowls on which the resin
pieces would rest pinned a a four centimeter distance from the wooden back support.

With the two stone pieces I began by using an angle grinder to cut out a basic shape of the desired composition and after this I used a an air pressured chisel. This is quite dangerous with such a soft material such as sandstone so after a short period I began carving in the traditional method of hand chisel and hammer. 

Each time the treatment of carving in the sandstone becomes more delicate. I started with a metal hammer and chisel and even that became a little too much for the stone so I made myself a wooden hammer from an old chair I found in the basement of Tabacalera.

 The piece is starting to take shape and I am now thinking they´re maybe two versions , one in sandstone and another in concrete once I have made molds in silicone. I think that the grey blue tint of the concrete will marry better with the blue of the resin strips.I intention is to get these pieces finished by the end of June and exhibit them along with other pieces at Tabacalera in Lavapies.