Playing With Fire

Working with steel will probably always be my first love but I have been experimenting with some other materials lately. I took a casting class a few months ago and made some interesting things in bronze. I would like to have used silver but the cost is just too high right now. With casting you can make objects from wax... here's wax carved into a cactus.

Or you can cast organic objects. Those are the bronze castings next to the "real" pine cone in the rear and the "real" pods on the right.

The wax or organic item is placed in a metal cylinder called a flask and it is filled with a high temperature plaster called investment. Then the flask is placed in an oven and the wax or organic material is burned away leaving a void in the investment that acts like a mold. The flask is then placed in a chamber and the assembly is wound up putting it under tension. Then bronze casting beads are melted in a ceramic crucible (the white dish) with a torch. Once melted the assembly is released and it spins the melted bronze into the mold.

Once you get used to the idea of handling the torch and the heat, we're probably talking about 1500 plus degrees to melt bronze, the process is really a lot of fun. The other thing I'm playing with is making glass beads. In this process you melt glass rods around a steel mandrel. Okay I'm starting to see a reoccurring theme here....I guess I like fire and working with hot materials.

So with my casting of the cactus and one of my glass beads I decided to make an assemblage. Here's the finished (6"x8") piece. It's a little bit like my still life on steel series but with a mixed media twist. I welded a steel back plate with a hanger on the back so I could hang the piece on the wall. Then I wrapped a board with some textured fabric for a background. The small piece of wood I found on one of my desert hikes. Not sure where this is all headed but I like the combination of hand made materials along with found objects.