sculpture

From big things little things grow

Bigthingsx

(photo credit: Australia Post)

Today Australia Post is issuing a stamp set featuring five of the 150-or-so Australian Big Things, large roadside attractions that seem to occupy an odd little corner of our national identity. The legendary Reg Mombassa is the artist, an inspired choice, as his style reflects the quirkiness and humour with which the big things are regarded.

The big merino about an hour up the highway from us in Goulburn was moved a few weekends ago. It’s an almighty concrete ram nicknamed Rambo, but has a souvenir shop nestled between it’s hind legs instead of rambo-ishness. It used to be on the Hume Highway to Sydney, until Goulburn was by-passed, but now it will be again. Sadly it seems that after all the effort, it is visible but not exactly predominant.

There are a few pictures of the move:

IBN News slide show
Newspix gallery
Tiscali News: On the rig

Merino

(Photo by Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images)

The ABC NSW also has a photo of the ram being built, and details of its construction. It actually is a light glass-reinforced concrete skin. Like a number of other big things, it was made by an Adelaide based company, Glenn Industries.

Merino3

Big Things: Australia’s Amazing Roadside Attractions by David Clark is also a good source if you are interested in how the big things were made, although from my point of view they never give enough detail. I like the stories of those that were made just by one or two people, eccentrics with a bee in their bonnets.

Back to Reg to finish off. This postcard has been on my fridge door since some campaign in 2002. I love the title as much as the drawing:

All the wild little horses

Horse sculptures

I loved making these two little horses recently for an up-coming theatre production, Emma’s Dynasty, by Jigsaw Theatre Company. They are based on an earthenware Chinese Han Dynasty horse that is here in the Australian National Gallery collection, but they are tiny in comparison, only 17 cm high at the head. I really like how stocky and wild the horse is, and how he looks like he has come to a screaming halt.

Horse

A while ago Andrew at PuppetVision linked to a super sculpey sculpting tutorial by Peter Konig, and it was really useful to me while I was doing the horses – thanks to you both! The tutorial is much more detailed than what I am going to write here – no sense repeating – and I can really recommend it.

The first steps were to make an armature using armature wire. In this case the strength the armature gives the legs and tail is particularly important. From the nose to the tail is one wire, and then the legs are separate wires, wired on with fine wire (Peter has close-ups on how to attach them), and set in place with Knead-It, a Selley’s two-part epoxy. You knead the parts together, and it sets as hard as a rock in five minutes – invaluable stuff!

Horse sculpture

I also used wire and Knead-It to attach the armature to a firm stand. I struggle with being too impatient at the beginning of a project to go to the trouble of making a firm base like this, and I often regret it – and know I’m going to regret it, what’s more! However, I’m getting wiser about this, and decided to follow Peter’s advice, even though the horse was small.

Horse sculpture

Another tip that I appreciated was to make a cardboard cutout of the silhouette of the horse to use as a reference while sculpting. I usually sculpt by eye, but this allows you to check how you are going.

Horse sculpture

I padded out some of the bulkier parts of the body with aluminium foil, as a way of saving how much super sculpey I needed to use later. Wire is wound around the armature wires to give something for the modeling clay to grip onto.

Horse sculpture

Now the best bit, the modeling! I’ve only recently started using Super Sculpey, and its a real pleasure to work with, because it remains soft for a long time and takes detail so well. Peter says to check it’s soft when you buy it, in case its been on the shelf a long time, and to keep it in a zip lock plastic bag.

Horse sculpture

So she kneaded it and punched it and pounded and pulled till it looked okay… You can use mineral turpentine to gently bush the surface detail to smooth it, and almost model the tiny detail with the brush.

Horse sculpture

Into the oven to bake. I had trouble fitting it in my oven still attached to the stand, and ended up putting it in on its side. I thought trying to cut off the support before the horse was baked might risk the horse getting squashed. Maybe next time I should make it so it unscrews instead.

Horse sculpture

Sawing the support bolt off was a little tricky, but manageable. There were a few small cracks, but I gather this is quite common, and took Peter’s advice to fill them with sculpey and blast it for a few seconds with a heat gun, only in my case it was with a hair dryer. Instant glue is effective for mending breaks. Then, on to the second horse.

Horse sculpture

Super sculpey takes acrylic paint very well, and I used a dappled mix of greys and terracottas to get the final finish.

Horse sculptures

There are more photos here. I guess I got a bit carried away, but sometimes that just happens.

Horse sculptures

The Model Family

Model family kit

A 1956 family in model aeroplane kit form, Guy Bottroff’s cool sculpture The Model Family, at the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition in Adelaide this last March. A few more photos here.

Model family kit

Sam Jinks

Jinks

I went to the National Portrait Gallery’s recent exhibition Truth and Likeness because it had one of Sam Jinks’ sculptures on display, one of his son as a very new baby. It’s lovely, and wonderfully detailed, but disquieting at the same time, because its larger-than-life scale acts against the usual instinct to coo over a tiny new born. I also felt an implication – something about the eyes – that this little boy, like all babies, was a secret package, a whole strong personality present in there, just waiting to emerge and be discovered by others over time. I liked that.

Sam Jinks is the artist whom Patricia Piccinini collaborated with to make some of her sculptures, such as The Young Family, but his name has been less well known in the past. It’s cool that he is now exhibiting in his own right. An exhibition of his recent work opens at the Boutwell Draper Gallery in Sydney this week, and you can see some work-in-progress making pictures at that link.

Jinks2

From previous exhibitions:
West Space Inc: 2005 photos
Sam Jinks, Distortions: review of his 2005 West Space exhibition
Carnal Knowledge: about Jinks, and how he thinks about his sculptures
J Arts Crew:: Sculpting the body

If the boots don’t fit redux

(photo via the Canberra Times)

Speaking of sculptures, one of my first blog posts was about Greg Taylor’s satirical bronze, If the boots don’t fit, which depicted the prime minister as dwarf ANZAC. I got a bee in my bonnet, and tracked it all over town. I was pleased to see that its still doing the rounds, and has most recently been placed on the high water mark on Horseshoe Bay at Bermagui, as part of the Bermagui Seaside Fair ‘Sculpture on the Edge’.

Taylor is quoted as saying Bermagui now has “arguably the safest beach in the world.” “What terrorist is going to come ashore there? And there will be no global warming – the sea will not dare rise.”

The best photos (and commentary!) I can find of the sculpture at Bermagui are by JohnG here: 1, 2, 3.

Trans-substantiation 2

During all the fuss about the chocolate Jesus in the US over the last week or two I kept thinking: ‘Hang on, that was done here years ago!’. Lo and behold, the Canberra Times eventually dredged up their 1994 article on Trans-substantiation 2, by Richard Manderson. With a story beginning with the sale of 100 raspberry-fondant-filled smaller Jesuses at the Gorman House markets, an Easter-egg-foil loin cloth, chocolate-dipped string for hair, a sound artistic statement, a clever title, and the cultural superiority of leading by 13 years, whats not to like?!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, blog friends. A new year and my 300th post!

Last night I dreamed vividly (and I mean vivid physically!) of giving birth – one of those oops-I-need-to-push, and-I’m-in-the-supermarket-and, oh-my-goodness-here-it-is! births, and then a tiny crumpled gorgeous creature cupped in my hands! (maybe because I had seen the tiny animals on fingers photos?)! You will have to take my word for it that it was a good dream, though, and surely its auspicious to dream of giving birth on a new year’s day, don’t you think?

These are the draft drawings I did for the poster for The Moth Tree. I’m particularly fond of the one with the little girl in it.

I used some chalky pastels to do this, and I always forget what lovely effects they give and how much pleasure I get from using them. I should really draw more often, just for pleasure.

A while ago I discovered a lovely sculpture in the ANU, Winged Harvest by Fiona Foley, which has silver bogong moths. I didn’t give them a thought when I was doing the poster, but I really think there must have been some subconscious connection going on here.

Mothssm

(photo credit: Tim Raupach: Cutflat)

Giant cross-section flower

Cross-section flower

My third project for Floriade was making a giant model flower in cross-section, to be the central display in CSIRO’s Division of Plant Industry’s information tent. I really enjoyed making this, too. Some projects go really easily and this was one of those!

The petals were the main challenge, but I decided pretty quickly to use a molded felt technique that I had previously tried with some masks. Essentially you saturate felt in white PVA glue, mold it to the shape you want, and then let it dry. It adopts the shape and becomes fairly hard and plasticised in a way. You can paint it, too, and the way the paint bleeds through the felt can be used in different ways, some quite sensuous. In this case, I made a petal shape in clay and each petal had a double layer with some aluminium flat bar running up the middle to give it extra rigidity. The interesting thing about the technique apart from the obvious texture, is that the felt can be stretched and pulled but remain in one piece. In this respect natural wool felt is much better to work with because it pulls and moves much more than synthetic felt. But synthetic is okay if you don’t have a choice.

I think the flower may end up being displayed in the CSIRO Discovery Centre, where some of my insect models are too; I hope so.

Greetings from Australia for OneWebDay


Greetings from Australia for OneWebDay yesterday/today! A few months ago I started making a sculpture or puppet, with the intention of it being performed in a public place on the day, but yesterday, the 22nd here, was so windy I would have got blown away, and today is, too. I’ve just updated my Flickr set of the making process, and maybe later there will be pictures of it in action. There is more of an explanation for the puppet with the photos at Flickr.