New Bronze Sculpture | Part One

Freshman year of college I made a bronze sculpture over the course of an entire semester. The process is time consuming, called lost wax casting, and a previously unknown art form to me. I never thought about the process of a heavy metal sculpture, as a naive freshman art major I just assumed it was carved out of a chunk of metal or something. The first time I made a bronze piece I was so completely captivated by the physicality and demands of it I decided to have my art emphasis on sculpture. I moved on to 3D Design and Sculpture II where I made wood pieces, metal pieces, paper pieces, cardboard pieces, and lots of other things involving assemblage and power tools and exacto knives. Last semester, I returned to my college art roots and created a new bronze piece. 

In the fall, I took a sculptural processes class (basically make whatever type of sculpture you desire). I showed up with a sketchbook of ideas from the Art and Faith class I took the previous semester. I knew I wanted to do bronze. My gracious professor heard my request and said, "Sure." It seems like a menial thing to note, but the process is nothing menial. I sketched and decided what to sculpt and then I went to Uganda in September. I returned and spent hours forming the face I had previously planned out of wax, only to be dissatisfied. It looked like a face, it had expression, it was great, whatever; I wasn't fulfilled. I was sitting staring at it one day when my professor came over with an axe and said, "React to this, not to your idea of what it is supposed to be." 

I went outside and hacked the face into pieces. It felt like a breath of fresh air. Perfection gone, replaced with broken pieces. Much more fitting for my initial concept and the million thoughts filling my head since Uganda. I was thrilled with the pointy chicken wire and the shattered pottery piece in the cheek. So, I finished sculpting the red wax face. I then put the wax through a process called "gating." Gating is taking thin, solid tubes of wax and attaching them to the piece to create pathways for the molten bronze to flow through from one point of entrance. I melted and attached the wax for a week, carefully turning the face around and around in my hands to make sure all the little grooves, high points, and low points would receive bronze and circulate so air bubbles could escape. 

After the gating the wax figure, now entrapped in a cage of wax, I submerged it into a cylinder of plaster. Goodbye, sculpted face I spent many hours on. Get ready to be melted. Once the plaster set up, the whole thing becoming the mold was put into a kiln upside down and the wax completely melted out. It is gone, whatever I had sculpted returned to a block of wax, ushering in a feeling of loss, but for the sake of creating something even more beautiful, that will live with much more permanence. 

I think it's one of the aspects that made me so desire to incorporate bronze into this past semesters piece. The lost wax process requires making and destroying and making and destroying. There is blood, sweat, and tears, always, because it is such a physical and time consuming process. It is not one and done. It is not like a painting where you can cover over a mistake, or a photo you can tamper with in Photoshop for hours. The mold is a one use thing, the bronze pouring cannot be started over. Hours and hours of work will end in a pour with high probability of something going not as planned. Still I risked it. 

Part II  on the pouring process, a “life threatening adventure” as described by my professor.