Although I am intending to cast from the 3D printed items I also had the opportunity to see what would happen if I took one of the objects and made a bronze cast, using the waste method. Because of the materials used they would burn away in the process leaving the void that the bronze would fill. This meant preparing the piece with wax sprues to allow gas vents and for the bronze to fill all the empty space.
This opportunity gave me the chance to see how the process would potentially work with the 3D printed items, although this cast is a closer representation of the original as it hasn’t gone through so many layers of communication to get to the final piece it still shows how one material can change when replaced with another and how a uniform finish can give a new meaning and understanding of how it can be read.
The above images are the raw casts with the sprues all still attached, I have just cleaned up the remnants of the plaster when it was broken out of the cast.
As I am interested in the space that will be left when the 3D printed pieces are cast I asked for the plaster to be kept so I could record what sort of marks, if any, were left when broken open. With this particular shape they were limited as the plaster can be very powdery and break into small pieces. I am intending to try and break out the pieces myself from the 3D printed casts so I can hopefully see more of the imprint.
Although there was very limited pieces of plaster to look at they had left traces of the negative space. During my latest tutorial we discussed the idea of the negative space or the void and how to understand the negative space you need to have knowledge of the positive object to read the negative space. Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Stairs) 2001 (https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/rachel-whiteread/exhibition-guide) as with much of Whiteread’s work you know the positive space, whether it be the inside of a house, a shed or indeed a stairwell you can therefore process the negative space.
While I was taking all the extra pieces off, that had been part of the running up process and therefore not part of the original I was considering how I may like to finish the piece. Do I polish it up and keep it with a shine or do I take it back to a duller surface using a patina, a forced chemical reaction, a kind of varnish.
I decided that I would keep it as a shiny finish, perhaps elevating it to a level to try and further divorce it from the original outcome. The items we had originally been given to work with were off-cuts, left overs, oddments and of little use in their current state but in this state they feel more of a treasure, giving them a collective quality and unity they couldn’t achieve as a bag of random items. It also has weight, physical and metaphorically as it conveys the collection, the transition and the elevation.
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