Cire Perdue, Limited Edition of 10 (Tree: Single Casting)
“Though she be but little, she is fierce! ” --- William Shakespeare These words were swimming thoughts when I had tried to successfully cast a single cluster of berries, only to discover that I had deeper concerns than I had ever originally anticipated. Starry Night, is named partly for the way a spotlight reflects little specks of light off of each berry, no matter what angle you choose to look at them, and partly for the folds, lumps and swirls reminiscent of Van Gogh’s famous impasto painting style, and bark texture of the Japanese Winterberry (ilex Serrata). My intention was to make something feminine and genial and if possible, something in a way that was understatedly comical. This would be a proud little tree. I found myself imagining a distant great aunt we often see portrayed in the movies; standing there with open arms and a gregarious smile, teetering over her heels and dressed in her Sunday's finest. Her stately attire is a bit snug around the midriff, and her visage is made complete as she dons a big fancy hat and a necklace of pearls. The reality of Starry Night was a bit fiercer. I was looking for a way to delve into a territory that would surpass my previous accomplishments with Fingers Crossed and Wish For More Wishes. I thought about the various species of trees that could present more of a technical challenge than the already formidable juniper. I contemplated the nemesis of all mold makers and the bane of our collective existence. I pondered the dreadful air bubble! Now the following is a little technical in nature, so please humor me for a moment. When a liquid is filling a space, and for our purposes, a space that we understand to be a mold cavity; any gas that currently occupies that cavity must be properly ventilated and allowed to escape. This prevents gas from being trapped in the mold cavity and later showing as a nasty pockmark on the surface of the casting. We understandably refer to this phenomenon as “air entrapment”. However, air entrapment is no laughing matter for anyone trying to achieve high quality, defect-free castings. In my experience, a shape that is most susceptible to this type of casting defect is a sphere because of how tricky it is to plan for ventilation. A cluster of spheres (in our case little berries) may be oriented in an almost infinite number of positions inside a mold, and any air bubbles trapped inside these little spheres will press themselves against the inner wall of each sphere in the direction of up. «Up» is naturally opposite of the earth’s gravity. If you grew up in the eighties, you might remember the magic eight-ball. If you shook it too hard, a bunch of bubbles would crowd the little window before you could read the plastic, icosahedral die. For some reason, it always wanted to tell me that everything I asked was “very doubtful”. And if you cast, let’s say for argument’s sake, one thousand berries all at the same time and you do not properly ventilate each and every berry in the direction of “up”; the bubbles will create terrible little craters in each and every casted berry. So once again, imagine a nice big red apple. Now take a big bite out of it and place it on the kitchen table with the bitten side facing up and multiply that image by a thousand. It’s like that. By the way if you're curious, an icosahedral die is a polyhedron with 20 faces.
Starry Night
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