Sculpture Project 2: Thoughts

For this sculpture project, our subject was mould making. Our two choices of media were cast plaster or cast wax. If we wanted to use plaster, we had to create a open-face latex mould of our object first, but if we wanted to cast only wax, we could either make the time-consuming latex mould, or simply take a plaster cast directly off the object itself and use that.

When we first started this project, I brought in two objects that I was interested in working with. One was a pint mason jar, and the other was a small empty bottle that once contained Very Cherre: Tart Cherry Blueberry Juice. I wanted to cast the mason jar in plaster because I think it is a very striking and iconic object, especially in the quasi-rural midwest, where they are ubiquitous, and as I find plaster to be an aesthetically pleasing yet quantidian material, I thought an appropriate choice. I wanted to cast the bottle in wax through, because of its unique shape, and when turned upside down I thought it looked kind of like an stylised tree.

Once I started casting though, I became more and more interested in the wax bottles than the mason jars and so I set them aside for now. Rather than make a simple two piece mould though (as the rest of my class had done) I decided to be adventurous and try to make a three piece mould so that I could include the detail of the depressed bottom of the bottle (which otherwise would have been a fairy incapacitating undercut had I left it unfilled in). What this extra step resulted in though, was many hours of frustrating as my moulds kept breaking, and I kept remaking them, until I finally finished the project, having mixed approximately 10 batches of plaster for the wax bottles alone, but also a very interesting, otherwise impossible shape in cast wax.