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