The Transmutation of the Relief

The 'wave' relief has undergone many changes since my last post about it back in October: from a turbulent breaking wave, a maelstrom of tide and currents, to an all together more settled and more 'artificial' composition, in the sense of it being 'made by or resulting from art or artifice' (OED), it being more 'contrived', more abstract as opposed to tending towards the representational/naturalistic.

This, like all the previous images of this relief, is in an intermediary stage:

Having explored the 'feel' of the swell, I've taken a step away from the 'wave' concept and am developing a composition that is still inspired by the element of water but is less closely evocative of a turbulent sea.

This came about as I began to think about what I would do with the clay form once I felt I had come to the end of my exploration of the relief for the moment. The size of this relief - about 1m square - makes it totally unmanageable in clay: it's far too heavy. Casting it in jesmonite seemed the answer - jesmonite is light-weight and strong - but I didn't want to do a simple cast from a silicon rubber mould because I didn't want it to be an ordinary relief, i.e. a 3D composition hung on the wall. I then had the idea of coating it with marble jesmonite (with a layer of quadaxial fabric to give it added strength) which would give me a true negative cast and a positive side that would need some reworking. This means the relief is viewed from both sides, back and front, positive and negative, and needs to be presented as a free-standing object.

I then set about making a couple of maquettes to try out my theory - the first measures about 30 cm and the second 50 cm.

Here are the clay forms:

And here are the jesmonite coated:

The next step is to remove the clay from the negative side and clean it up and rework/refine the postive side.

The maquettes should give me a better idea of a) how that negative space works, i.e. which shapes work and which don't work in the negative, so I can transpose that to the composition of the large relief; and b) whether the jesmonite is strong enough for this kind of method and looks good enough once rasped and sanded.

Now I just need to wait for the clay to dry out so it comes away cleanly from the jesmonite ...