Long Time / Change Of Plans

Ok. It's been a terribly long time since the last update. Forgive me. Things have taken a surprising turn, and keeping the blog up to date has been the last thing on my mind.

First and foremost, with the help of my able assistant Amy, I was able to pull a complete casting of Mama's In The Arbor.

I ended up using the Polytek 1512x with whatever the name of the fabric they sell is (kind of a finely woven tyvek). The material works pretty well, but it is REALLY sticky, so I had extremely hard time getting it out of the mold. Also, there are a couple of places where the two parts weren't mixed sufficiently, so the material didn't set up properly. In short, this is an extremely expensive and labor intensive proof of concept, but not the final. On the plus side, I love it, it looks pretty much like I hoped it would, and the initial feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. 

Here's an image of the back, which I think looks kind of great, and which is heavily, heavily reinforced with various gauges of bent steel rod. 

This was all accomplished toward the end of last semester, sometime between late November and early December, and I was trying to get motivated to start work on the FINAL final, when I went to a meeting with Lance Fung of Fung Collaboratives, and had to completely shift gears. 

Lance has been engaged by Atlantic City to develop a series of art parks in some of the vacant lots near the boardwalk. The first site, Artlantic:Wonder, "featur[es] works by acclaimed artists Robert Barry, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, John Roloff, and Kiki Smith in collaboration with New York landscape design firms Balmori Associates and Philadelphia-based Cairone & Kaupp." (from the artlantic blog). 

After our conversation in Dec., Lance commissioned me to make a series of sculptures for the next project, Artlantic:Glorious. Things have been full sprint/crazy headlong run every since.