"Reaching Through 1" submitted to "Awakenings" at Peckham Safe Houses

 So having said "yeah babes, I don't do open calls, yah", guess what... But... but... But it was a weird one, and it looks so innocent, and it's at the Safe Houses (where I did "Where You From") which I love, and it was only a tenner if you are selected... 

The theme is "Awakenings", which I like, which put me in mind of awakening from grief (which I feel I have a little, my art is less angry now). I was inspired by an Instagram post (it does happen) of an old pump. The street level had raised, and the beautiful old rusted iron lion's head spout was now half-embedded in the tarmac. I love the idea of things being partly hidden or submerged (fuck knows why, I just do... maybe a topic to reflect on some other time) so I really wanted to do something like that using a life cast of my hand, half 'embedded' (but actually uncast) in a plaster plinth.

Having decided to do the open call, I racked my brain for a way to incorporate the theme of "awakening" and "awakening from grief" in a way that incorporated the half-sunk hand. Eventually, having walked in a local nature park that I adore, I was inspired by the prickly sweet chestnut husks. I imagined a block of plaster, with a prickly carpet of sweet chestnut husks, and fingers reaching through them, bringing together themes of sleeping in nature, awakening, pain, reaching, and my own hand.

For anyone who might actually read this, and doesn't want to read a tedious description of my process, I'll get to the chorus - this is the finished piece

The more astute of you will notice, those are NOT sweet chestnut husks... So read on...

Having gathered the materials, I had a lot of grief casting my hand. The actual life cast came out amazingly, with stunning amounts of details (so much so that I worry people might use it to steal my fingerprints...). 

I decided to make a silicone mould from this so I could easily cast more if I needed them - prototypes and spares! I was lazy, and made a big block mould, rather than making a plaster support. I used the nice blue silicone I just got on Amazon, and then the trouble started... 

I could not demould the original for love nor money... I admit I didn't use any release agent, but I've never needed to... Eventually it came out, but the fingers broke off in the process.. Bugger. Somewhat bothered, I cut some of the HUGE chunks of unnecessary silicone off the mould (such a waste of money and resources :( ) and cast another, giving the mould a good layer of release agent before... And bugger me, THAT wouldn't come out either... Long story short, I looked on the website of the company I got the silicone from, and the nice blue colour silicone is completely different silicone from the boring green silicone I've been using so far... And yeah, it's for use if 'bigger projects that need more support' - basically it's FAR less stretchy than the green, hence all the demoulding woes... Drat... (yet another) Lesson learnt... I bit the bullet and just cast myself a fresh life cast and used that directly...

I knew I wanted to embed the whole caboodle in resin, to protect the spines from people (and people from the spines), but also to represent the sense of a moment, frozen in time. Plus, I like the idea of people peering into the depths to see the fingers. To embed them, the husks had to be bone dry (or they will rot inside the resin). Unfortunately, when I dried them out and prototyped them in the mould, they started to look more fuzzy than spiky

At this point, I was trying to think of something with more robust spines, and I thought of gorse, which I love, and which has long associations of childhood (Cornwall) and grief (the local heath). I gathered some in a carrier bag that was already obligingly cut down by the local rangers and dried out nicely in the September sun. I worried it would look a bit 'weak' against the white plaster so I decided to paint it black....

Generally, I think I need to have a rule not to ever paint shit! That said, after a lot of faffing, I ended up mixing the painted pieces with unpainted pieces, and it actually worked quite well - it makes for a much more interesting colour gambit than just white and brown. 

Pouring the epoxy went well - deep pours, but robust materials so I wasn't bothered by heat. I learnt my lesson and mixed and mixed until I thought I was going to die of boredom, and then mixed some more... I had a panic when I came down the next morning and the surface was still slightly soft, but then I remembered it was a really chilly night (epoxy needs heat to cure), so I gave it a bunch more time on a warm windowsill, and it hardened up beautifully. I also used brown ink to dye the first layer of resin, but put in WAY too much, so it looked like brown puddle water...

Final decision was the finished piece looked odd because the layers showed and the light shining through the sides of the brown first layer looked really... well... brown.. Blocking the light with my hand convinced me I needed to cover the base in something opaque. I hit on the idea of putting the whole thing BACK into a slightly bigger mould, and casting a think plaster 'mount', to hide the bottom layers and stop the light shining though. This worked really well, and gave the whole thing the feeling of being like a 'nest' with the fingers emerging through it.

I was really pleased with the piece, so much so, I decided to submit it to the open call without doing the sweet chestnut version (plan A was to do both and compare). However, I am now working on that one, which I will share in a later edition of this sinterlating read... I like the fact that this pieces is less angry, and I like the fact that I kept to a mostly monotone palette. I feel like this could be a new way forward for my art in a 'post-rage' world...

A Personal Art Manifesto v0.9

I want to take my learning and reflection from the last year to come up with a 'manifesto' for my own art. This is NOT a manifesto in the sense of defining what art should be for everyone, rather it is a rallying call and 'bar setting' for what I want my art to be. I hope and expect to revisit and revise this statement as the year progresses (and beyond). 

After much effort to organise these statements, I leave them to stand as they are!

My art should be:

• Honest 
• A true and genuine attempt to communicate something I believe in
• My best possible effort, created with care and effort
• Respectful 
• Respect the viewer's gift of attention, whoever they may be
• Be accessible on many levels
• Don't be a smart-arse
• Don't be obscure, strive for universal truths
• Allow the viewer space for their interpretation, don't bully a point
• Be minimal in both physical and emotional resources
• Dignified
• Too small is better than too large
• Too quiet is better than too loud
• Pieces should speak for themselves without needing long explanations (or ideally titles)
• Don't pander to people's expectations
• Pieces should defend their message and boundaries (independent of context insofar as this is possible)
• Beguiling
• Attract attention and reward it with intricacy and depth
• Draw the viewer deeper with playfulness and/or hidden depth
• Make even difficult things easy to contemplate
• Balanced
• Balance meaning, aesthetics, and technique/skill
• But meaning is more important than  aesthetics and aesthetics is more important than skill
• Balance gravitas and playfulness
• Key pieces should contribute to my wider practice and should be curated accordingly

Questions to ask myself about my art:

• Do I mostly know what this means? Is the meaning unclear to me? Is the meaning too prescriptive? Is there one meaning, or many? What else could this mean?
• Is the meaning something I genuinely feel deeply?
• Is this obscure? Could anyone get something from this?
• Would this piece work without a title or placement card?
• Is anything missing? Could anything be taken away?
• Is this my best possible effort, respecting my own limitations
• Does this piece shallow? Is it ugly? Is it technically poor? If so, does it's beauty compensate for its shallowness? Does it's meaning compensate for its poor quality? etc
• Does this grab your attention? Does it reward it when is has it? What's the first impression? What's the second? The third...
• How does this fit into my wider practice?

But not necessarily

I also wish to record the following 'anti-manifesto'.... I do not consider it important for a piece of my art to be:

1. Commercially successful or even saleable
2. Important to society as a whole
3. Created in pursuit of some 'worthy' cause such as saving the planet (we got ourselves into this mess, lots of us will die before we are motivated enough to get ourselves out of it)
4. Technical demonstrations of skill in some medium - I am the artist who walks by himself - all mediums are alike to me ;)

  

"All My Heart" Accepted For "The Beat" Exhibition 🎉

My Dear Reader,

I fear I have not written for many weeks. Work has been intense, and my obsessions grip me like a vice. I fear your heart will grow cold to me, but since you will not, or cannot, return these letters, I must journey on, like a small boat, awash in a storm of uncertainty, and far from your sunlit shore.

When I last wrote to you of my labours, I was much vexed by the phenomena that chemists (those most-noble men of science, and aye, I hear tell, women too), are pleased to call 'Thermal Runaway'. My epoxy grows hot, and frustrated for any outlet to vent its wretched heat, grows ever hotter, but that serves only to feed the fire of its lust for combination and chemicaling, leading it to ever greater fiery passion, till my wax grows weak, fails, and spurts up in orgasmic plumes. It's weakness of character causes me much angst and sorrow, dear reader.

But linger not on this sad and sordid matter, for I have good news! As I detailed to you in my last letter, I am replete and blessed with many options to pursue, and pursue them I did! What joy! I took in hand my heart of plaster and (that most evil of substances) epoxy, and I did lay it down in a hard but enveloping bed of the same. Thus half-sunk in that most evil juice of satan's loins, I did stop and ponder of the meaning of such half-consumption of one by the other. After much angst, I spoke to my friends, those that are both critical and deceased, and we did all agree that such half-embedding was most excellent in manner, and dripping most winsomely with meaning and potential, and so I stopped.

Behold:

The heart, that is to say, the fist, sits half-consumed by the devil juice. Is it sinking? Does it rise? Does it seek protection? Or risk escape? Who know, dear reader! Not I! But I have my thoughts, which I beg you indulge me to keep, and let other make of it as they will!

With this achieved, my mind turned to the last of my hearts, so fragile, and discomfortingly fashioned of the same material as the heart that I had lost. Ah, my poor lost heart! I would not loose another, so I spurned the devil juice completely! So how to show this little trinket? Why in my trinket box, which I had purveyed from that great merchant, run by the excellent and in no way creepy, Mr Bezos. I was much taken with this box, and the price was most reasonable owing to Mr Bezos' forward-thinking and customer-centric practice of not paying his workers a living wage. Hazzah!

My heart did not fit in this box, although it was much taken by it, so I sought to extend it. The box put me in mind of a reliquary, made to hold the wretched remains of a dead person of great standing with the christian church, for what else would one do with the desiccated heart of someone much respected save put it in a vessel with accommodating windows, and let vast numbers of total strangers kiss it? It's certainly what I wish to be done with my rotted chest pump when I am no-longer in need of it!

Dear reader, second only to the devil juice epoxy, I fear and hate most the saw that cuts in circles! A saw that cuts holes of beautiful smooth roundness, but at what a cost of screaming and grating and burning and spitting of sawdust. Nevertheless, I befriended this beast and set it to work fashioning a plate of wood, with a depression in the middle, of exactly the size requested by those wonderful fellows and felloweses at The Beat. That done (and it was no small task, nor without great terror and peril), I placed the heart inside, and Mr Bezos' excellently-priced box over the top, inverted in the manner of a lid:

I was mighty pleased, but mindful that my opinion matters not, I sent electronic pictograms to those wonderful Beaters, and they send word that they too held the fruits of my efforts in high-esteem! What joy! I let out a sound of joy quite unbecoming of a gentleman, and disturbing to the company present, who feared for my health, or perhaps my continence.

And so you see, I feel great joy, and I wish I could share it with you dear reader! Why do you not write me back? Has your heart grown cold? Should it too, perhaps, be torn from your chest and placed in a brass and glass case, so I might finally have it near me?

In great anticipation of your swift and grovelling response,

Mr Tom

All My Heart: Prototyping, and experimenting, and spares (oh my!)

Long rambling post... The take-home lesson learnt is that it is vital to make spares, create tests, experiment, and keep your options as open as possible. If possible, make a prototype of every major step, and use those prototypes to test and experiment, and clear hurdles for your 'real' piece. 

I have sworn off open calls - they inevitably charge a tonne to enter, require delivery in-person, always reject my work, and often make me feel rather shit in the process. I've promised myself I'll only enter open calls if 1) they are relevant 2) they are free and 3) I have something already made (or I am so grabbed by an idea I HAVE to make it).

Unfortunately I just broke all three rules... My excuse is that I know the artist involved, and had a good experience before, and it's a local group... So I'm entering "The Beat" by the Ashford Visual Artists group. After musing on the theme, I was struck by the connection between beating hearts, and my daughter's hypoplastic left heart. I really wanted to submit a 3d piece (the format of the open call means 2d pieces get lost a bit, at least they did last time), so I thought about making a heart out of wax. The open call has a quirk - pieces must be less than 12cm x 12cm x 12cm. In trying to picture the size of a heart, I think I semi-consciously held my fist to my chest, because your heart is meant to be roughly the size and shape of your fist... And inspiration struck! I decided to life-cast my daughter's fist and make a 'heart' from that. 

Step one went smoothly - my daughter was a trooper in agreeing to let me use her fist in my art (I DID ask her permission!), but also keeping still when I shoved her hand into a huge jug of cold minty alginate. I thought she would love the smell and hate the feeling... She loved the feeling but hated the smell! Nevertheless I was able to get a great impression, and cast a really nice plaster 'master' from it:

Next step was to make a silicone mould from the plaster master, which went wrong because I didn't have QUITE enough silicone to cover the hand... Thankfully I lucked out - I turned the hand upside-down because I knew you could sometimes get away with casting like that - it's how I did my 'foxy' moulds. From this mould I cast a wax fist:

All systems go! It actually works better as a 'heart' that a full cast would have done (plus it was staggering how much wax even a 'half-fist' required)

I set the wax fist to one side

I decided I wanted to make 'half' a heart (hypoplastic left heart syndrome is often referred to as having "half a heart"). My original plan was to remove half the fist in some way, but with the wax cast to hand, it was immediately clear that cutting away was going to make it much harder to see it was a fist (plus the detail of the nails was exquisite!), so I decided to cast half in wax and half in clear epoxy... I'd had the idea of trying mixed casts for a while.

I got some clear epoxy, and immediately tried making a foxy cast and a cast from the mould I used for the wax heads. This gave me the confidence to mix and pour epoxy.

I set the resin fox to one side

My first plan was to put something in the mould to occupy the space that would eventually be epoxy, then cast the remaining space in wax. My first attempt was a scrunched up carrier bag... It was a total disaster (the carrier bag melted, got stuck to the wax etc)... 

My next thought was to cast a whole hand in plaster, break off a nice chunk, and the put it back in the mould. I did this, but my hammer skills were clearly not what I hoped because I ended-up smashing it into 3 big pieces... Deterred but not beaten, I put two back in the mould and filled the gap with epoxy. The idea being to remove the plaster and then cast the remaining epoxy with the wax.

The result was beautiful, the epoxy carried on the shape where the plaster left off, exactly as I hoped! However, it was clear that the plaster was NEVER going to come off the epoxy - it was fused into one glorious whole. I noticed that because the plaster had been removed from the mould and re-inserted, the seal around it wasn't great, and a lot of epoxy had leaked over the surface of the plaster in a thin 'skin'.

I set the plaster and epoxy fist to one side

Finally I hit on the idea of casting a fist in alginate, removing part, putting it back into the mould, pouring wax into the missing part, and then digging out the alginate. This worked although the alginate hand was really creepy - slippery, floppy, and tearing with the consistency of cooked flesh! With the wax fist securely in the mould (bonus I didn't have to even demould it, so it was well sealed into the mould), I poured the epoxy:

Finally! This was what I was aiming for! 

I thought I was done, but then came a big set-back... How to display it? It didn't look like art just sitting on the bench... At least, not to me... It was also crazy delicate - hold the wax too long and it starts to go soft... Hold it longer and it starts to melt! I needed a way to display it, so I bought a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm acrylic display cube.

I was very excited when it turned up... But my excitement turned to dismay... It was cheap, ugly, and actually the hand didn't sit in it very well...  And so I was hit by the best-worst idea ever! I would entomb the entire piece in epoxy!

Finally all those set-aside objects came into their own! 

I knew the clear resin might 'disappear' when embedded, so I hit on the idea of using white wash to pick out the details while allowing the broader areas to 'disappear', and because I had resin foxy to hand, I could immediately use it as a test:

Yes! It works - firstly the paint works to show the details almost like an etching... And secondly, yes, everything else DOES disappear!

Next up I used the wax heart to test doing an embedding. I did my research, and I knew heat could be a problem, so I needed to do multiple pours - i.e. build up several smaller layers, allowing each to cure and cool before adding more. Having the wax fist allowed me to test this without risking the 'real' fist I had worked so hard to make... And thank goodness I did:

Disaster!! The final pour came up a bit short, so I pushed it from 200ml to 300ml, also I stupidly used a piece of felt (actually the cleaning cloth from the accursed acrylic case!) as a cover... BUT actually it was more like a saucepan lid! I came back after an hour to find the mould hot to the touch, the epoxy almost cured (in around a 20th of the expected time), and melted wax fountaining up like a lava lamp... SHIT!! Clearly I had trapped enough heat that the epoxy had 'flash cured' - the curing is both exotermic and accelerated by heat, so it had gone into what in my chemistry days I would have called "thermal runaway" - it got hotter and hotter, and so cured faster-and-faster, giving more-and-more heat, in a chain reaction...

Lesson-learnt! Next time I will limit my pours (even if I have to get up in the night to do the final pour) and I will not cover the mould with anything that could trap the heat!).

But the real lesson-learnt is to make and keep all those tests and prototypes! Yes, I screwed up, but I have lots of options:

1. I know the pitfalls of overheating
2. I have two spare 'hearts' to get it right
3. I COULD submit the plaster heart instead of the wax+epoxy one, and still be happy
4. Foxy has tested the risk of the clear epoxy 'disappearing' when embedded
5. If the embedding of the plaster heart fails, I have the option to forego embedding the wax+epoxy one and I have already bought jewellery box I could display it in instead