MMT3:2 Casting the internal space of a vessel

I used plaster in a plastic glove, but the texture of the plaster was awful and it remained crumbly after it dried. Next I tried the same but tied thread around the glove. It looked exciting when drying but the plaster wasn’t strong enought to hold its shape and after I removed the glove all the fingers quickly broke off. This could work well with concrete though if i could find a way to prepare the inside of the glove with oil to release the concrete. I kept thinking of Rebecca Farley’s work and wishing I had more space to work with larger concrete pieces!

Latex was completely new to me. I had a lot of fun making a cast from my son’s hand, and cast it in plaster. Some of the cast collapsed when he took his hand out so the model of his fingers is a little squashed in places but still, the level of detail it picked up was amazing and with some patience I coud make beautiful things with this.

I poured concrete in to an old sock. It was hard to remove the sock after as a lot of the threads and fluff had stuck in the concrete! Not super succesful. In fact sitting drying in fron of the radiator it resembles a large turd haha

Below you can see what happened when I poured concrete in to a bag, tied it off with some string and hung it up to dry. I love the texture that resulted from the folds in the bag and the tied up areas bulging out but had not counted on the bag getting stuck inside the folds and me not being able to remove parts of it! I have no idea how you would avoid this as whatever material you would use would get stuck unless the tieing was done with a much wider material perhaps.

Below I used resin for the first time. I pured resin in to a plastic fruit tray I had also used with plaster, and I embedded a dragon fly that had died on my doorstep in it. I had to pin the dragon fly down as it wanted to float and it trapped a few air bubbles under its wings and body but overall I love how this piece has two things going on, a lovely texture from the tray with some very clear lettering and even the recycle symbol and then the dragon fly floating inside. I really enjoyed using resin, it was easy to use and incredibly effective! Shame I ran out after just a few experiments.

Below I filled a takeaway coffee cup with finds from my Thames mudlarking from a few days before, and resin. What I hadn’t counted on was the resin picking up on the slightly mottled surface of the inside of the cup and this making the final piece opaque rather than clear. Unintended but in a way a learning opportunity and the end result makes it quite a mysterious piece where the more you peer in the more you see but some pieces are lost in the murky depths. Bit like the actual Thames then!

Below I used two halves of a concrete milk bottle I had created previously, and attempted to create a resin layer in between the two, filled with pompoms. I hadn’t counted on the majority of the resin dripping down the sides of the lower piece and despute me turning it upside down quite quickly there wasn’t enough resin left to fill the pompom layer. I do quite like what happened to the pompoms but as I had run out of resin and actually could not think of a way to keep the resin from flowing away anyway I did not create what I had hoped to create. I wanted to sandwich the resin layer in between the two concrtete layers to “complete” the milk bottle again but alas it wasn’t to be.

I bought more resin and built some “walls” around the edge of the concrete piece to contain the resin but it was an even bigger disaster than before. The resin almost instantly pushed the edges of the plastic I had used away and resin flowed out of the bottom of the structure and all over my worktop and dishwasher! I reinforced the structure with about half a roll of gaffa tape and added the original mik bottle mold and eventually it did hold some more resin. I added some glitter to this resin to funk it up a little and at least the spillage looked nice! Once it had set I decided to wrap the piece, some more pom-poms and the other concrete milk bottle piece, with some metal wire and tule trim to hold it all together. It looks kinda nice but it lacks a story, this is definitely not a piece I’m proud of really.