Weird plaster cubes... Or the return of the reliquary...

 For a few weeks, I've been driven by an urge to make little plaster cubes with glass windows. Getting nowhere with thinking, I swapped to doing, and made a prototype:

Weirdly, making a prototype helped me to see that I needed to place small objects inside... Small fragments of nature. Originally I thought these would hold my miniature thickets, but this felt right. I think I might try miniature thickets too - perhaps take my string and plaster experiment from before and enclose that, or make a web of threads. I'm in free-experimentation really.

However, one interesting thing that did come out, was I was thinking about my 'cubes vs corpses' post, and Tathos said "but the cubes are corpses", and somehow he was right. I wondered how they fitted into my practice, but I think they are actually a return of the reliquary that I made for "All my heart". They are sort of the love-child of "All my Heart" and "Reaching Through". Somehow, in my soul, the contents of each cube is a corpse, but so is the whole object. Weird shit.

The natural thing to do next feels like making more and stacking them up into some sort of charnel house... But maybe that's a 'treat' to myself once the MA is over? A thought to come back to, to keep the momentum in uncertain times ahead?

Treats now or treats later? Cubes or corpses

I carefully removed my first miniature thickets from their mould this morning. As a finished product, it falls far short of the mark, but as a prototype, it is a very promising start:

Clearly there is a lot of work to do here, exciting work! The cube is super-weird, but it's the first time I feel I've gotten close to what I had with epoxy in terms of light, and the feeling of something trapped in time - or here, trapped in glass and plaster

But...

But should I really be embarking on this escapade? Shouldn't I be working on my submission for the final show? Surely I have lots of time... But I KNOW how my mind works... I'm getting excited on these little plaster cubes of weirdness... And soon I'll forget all about Open Casket, and going back to it will seem like a terrible imposition. 

Some would say that's because I've moved on from it... But I don't believe that - I am still, at heart, a pragmatist. I know if I put my little cubes aside, and go back to prototyping Open Casket, the love will quickly return. I'm not moving on, or falling in love, I'm stalling because the 'easy' decisions for Open Casket are mostly made, and I don't want to have to face the hard decisions that require prototyping and compromise, and angst.

But I must!

Miniature Thickets Experiment with plaster and string

 Unsure how to approach the miniature thickets, I decided to start with plaster soaked string and see what happened. I split cotton string into bundles of different strands, and threaded them though a cardboard 'lid' cut to the size of one of my cubic silicone moulds. I tried knotting a few bundles along their length. I think dipped the whole lot thoroughly in plaster, poured a bit of plaster into the mould to form a 'base', then put the 'lid' on, with the plaster soaked string dangling down into the 'base' layer. The strings were held quite well-apart at the top by the holes in the lid, but being soaked in plaster, naturally started to clump together.

After it had somewhat dried, I tried to remove the cardboard (which was quite sodden) to allow more air circulation. I immediately discovered that strings were very brittle, but I managed to remove the 'lid' in pieces, and left it to set completely.

I was initially quite disappointed - the plaster had formed 'plugs' against the cardboard lid, given the tops of each string a clubbed appearance, almost like a flower. The strings were also quite sparse in places where they had clumped together. The strings all looked the same - the plaster coating had hidden any differences from knotting or thickness.

Having had a bit of time, it's grown on me, but it reveals a broader problem - it's quite hard to create a structure that is open enough to look into, but dense enough to feel 'enclosed'. I also would like more of a branching structure. 

My next move is two-fold - I want to experiment with real twigs, and I also want to experiment with some sort of 'building' or structure. I started mocking this up in balsa wood, but I couldn't really cut and think... So I've extracted the dimensions of the balsa and the mould into Blender, and I think I'll model it virtually and then cut it when I have a design I'm happy with...

Miniature Thickets...

[09:37, 08/02/2025] Tom: Miniature thickets
[09:55, 08/02/2025] Tom: Growing from a solid base? Hiding things - traces? Signifiers?
[09:56, 08/02/2025] Tom: Solid back? More solid side? Gaps and strands
[09:56, 08/02/2025] Tom: String soaked in plaster?
[09:57, 08/02/2025] Tom: White? Grey? Brown? Mottled? Painted?
[09:58, 08/02/2025] Tom: Steps? Windows? Bricks? Rubbish?
[09:58, 08/02/2025] Tom: Plastic/glass front?

I have a strange urge to make miniature 'thickets'! I don't know exactly what form they would take, but they would capture the feeling of crouching down to peer into the interior of a thicket.

For anyone who has not been lucky enough to peer into a thicket, the experience is one of peering through the leaves into a hidden world of stems and clearings of bare ground inside. The canopy forms a miniature world of uncertain scale. A cathedral of stems holding up a roof of leaves.

The urge is strange and strong. For me such thickets have strong associations with my childhood in Cornwall, but also my current interest in history, which often sees me peering into the undergrowth, in search of odd traces of the past - bumps, hollows, a crumbling right-angle of concrete. These places speak of concealment, of traces of the past, of portals to other worlds, of miniature forests of uncertain geography.

I don't know how I want to model these 'thickets' as such - I want to evoke the feeling without creating a weird empty diorama. I want this to be an artistic interpretation, not a literal model. I think they will be cubes containing some form of dense 'web' of strands, perhaps 'growing' in organic clumps, perhaps concealing some form of 'secret'. I'd like to cover each face with glass, but I don't know if that's doable.

Current thinking is to experiment with some form of plaster creation - use a cube mould, and then perhaps drape string soaked in plaster into it. I'll do some experiments and see... I could potentially borrow an idea from 'Reaching Through' and place the cube, which glass tacked to the open sides, into a bigger mould and cast the glass into place (obviously placing something like clay over the middle of each pane to leave an open 'window').

This idea sort of jumped me... But actually has some clear ancestry into 'Reaching Through', into the undocumented experiment with creating epoxy cubes with plaster inclusions, into the branching forms of the Growth Simulation pictures I've been posting on Insta, into the 'holey face', into the uncompleted plaster 'industrial ruins' I keep starting and abandoning... I like that I am becoming more and more aware of the connections between my seemingly disparate pieces.