In trophy VIII I showed you how I’d been casting in plaster the voids between stacked golf balls. Well, end result is this.
I initially decided to fix nails into the plaster and then embed them into the piece of oak but when I stood the plaster with nails on the wood it looked good to me, almost floating so I adjusted my thinking [and made holes just deep enough to superglue the nails].
There’s some other stuff building up so I’ll get on and do some more blog posts for them…. Vincent
Four of us from college have been doing some work with a local gallery, According to McGee, and are getting some credit – here’s a link to The Press’ piece Elaine Thomas’ Devine Antics . We get a mention below the second picture in the article.
Elaine’s exhibition is on until the 4th of April and I hope loads of people get to see it.
Vincent
Here is the outcome of some more throwing and glazing. First up are three pieces from the pugged clay that gets recycled at college with the same overall glaze but a second glaze applied in different ways. The wide mouthed vase was dipped in one glaze and then I tried to dip the widest portion in. I think that it looked better before firing – in matt pink and orangey brown as in the right hand picture.
The more slender vase was likewise dipped in the first glaze but then I trailed fingers wet with the second glaze over the first; there a few drips which ran in different directions. In comparing the left and right images you can see how firing changes colours and sharpness of edge and the one orangey brown pre-firing comes out with some very dark browns, which have “sunk” towards the base of the vase while the glaze was molten.
Final pugged clay is a flatfish bowl with the second glaze dripped on top and spread around the rim. Perhaps it is easier with this piece to see how much the second firing affects the pattern edge and consistency of colour.
With all of the above pieces, I think the overall glaze helped the second glaze to run and spread out.
The other three pieces are in a St Thomas’ clay, which has less iron in it so offers less brown to the glazes. The overall glaze was supposed to be a dolomite matt opaque glaze but I don’t think much of the opaque elements are present – I did give it a very good stir! Also, there was a slight rush on to complete the glazing ready for the firing and I didn’t take shots of the pieces below before they were fired – sorry I shall try to do so from now on.
This is another shallow bowl and I dripped the second glaze on it. Depending how thick the drips were has affected how much they have run into the bowl. Unfortunately, there is a crack in the rim [at about 9:30]. I was surprised that it has survived the two firings and not broken.
This odd shaped bowl had two different glazes poured in off my hand – scooped the runny glaze in a cupped hand, poured it in towards the base and then poured the excess out over the rim. Then did the other glaze – the white on the edge is from the overall glaze; a bit of serendipity as I think it would have looked less interesting if the white was all over.
And the final piece [which I’m pleased with both the shape and pattern] had the second glaze flicked on it while I still had traces of the pale bluish glaze on my fingers. The white [1 to 3 o’clock is, I think, some of the dolomite white].
Haven’t been on the wheel for awhile so it’s probably time to have another go – if I can get hold of some St Thomas [or other low iron clay for throwing] before it all gets used up.
Vincent
Good and not so good has come out of re-assembling the shuttering around the concrete and ping pong balls: Good in that the cracks seem to be less evident and the concrete seems more solid.
Good in that the the mix I used looks as if it might take a polish – given the shiny surface on the bits which filled up the cut portions of balls.
Good that the hexagon shape remained regular…..
But only at the bottom! The top sheared two screws and opened up – the wonders of water and the forces of nature!
What next? Well, the gaps are very narrow between the balls and I fear that if I try and dig the balls out bit by bit the whole thing will all fall apart [one bit at the top has already broken off]. So the plan is to burn them out [they might melt out which would help lessen the smoke]. However, if I try that now, the water in the concrete is likely to boil and blow the whole lot up. I shall just have to wait until it dries out more – I shall start again on this project next term!
Vincent
Well, I carefully took the shuttering off the concrete and ping pong balls to see how it looked…
… pretty bad. The surface hasn’t got as many bubbles in it as I had thought would be the case. Most of the part cut balls filled, at least in part, with concrete so there was less to fill the void and take the concrete to the top of the shuttering.
It is clear that taking the pressure off by lifting the top meant that the balls expanded and cracked the concrete into layers. However, I’ve taken the view that it can’t get much worse if I clamp everything up again while the concrete still seems soft. Maybe, just maybe, the cracks will heal over and the structure stand the forces generated when the shuttering comes off – probably that will happen in a week or so [I’ll ask Ed for guidance].
Time to something in no way related to the Trophy project. Vincent
Back in Trophies VIII I mentioned that I had ordered 150 ping pong balls to cast in concrete. Well, they arrived and they would never have been any good for ping pong – wrong plastic and internally lumpy so they have little bounce and that bounce is highly unpredictable! So, some have been used.
I made a hexagonal column out of some “waste” ply and Phil in the joinery department kindly put a 60 degree chamfer on one long edge of each piece. Top and bottom drilled out for fixing and pouring.
Balls stuck together with superglue and 1/2s and 1/3s made to fill out the form.
So it all started coming together yesterday but I had only made a rough estimate of how tall the hexagon would be; I hadn’t stuck enough balls together. “Never mind”, I thought squeeze some on top….
… and screw the lid down – a bit of compression should help with the enlarging the “kiss” points between the balls. And then I did my calculations about how much concrete to make – work out the full volume and the void volume for the concrete is a percentage of that – simple BUT I did not allow for 1] the fine concrete powder fitting into the gaps between the sand grains and 2] that the part balls might fill with concrete. Consequently, I was short of the lid by about 1/2 a ball’s depth! Lots of banging of the form to get rid of air bubbles and get the concrete to flow between the balls.
This morning, when I opened the top, it was clear that a lot more time was going to be needed before I could take off all the shuttering and work on the concrete as it was sticky like barely cooked cake mix.
You can see where I’ve removed three balls that the kiss points are relatively large and that should help when I try to remove the ping pong balls. There is a further downside to how I have managed the pour and that is by releasing the pressure of the lid today, the balls can start to expand putting the concrete under tension, which it will not like and so it may all pull apart before it has set – we’ll know how well it’s gone before Easter.
What next?? Cheers, Vincent
I was going to put up the next bit of work on the trophy project but I have decided to place an embargo on it.
I am still registered as a physiotherapist and as such should not bring the profession into disrepute. I think that the work, a medal of dishonour, is likely to offend someone somewhere. If I keep it private, like my thoughts on politics and religion, I can feel confident that no one can say my actions are bringing the profession of physiotherapy into disrepute. Once I come off the register, I shall add the piece to this blog.
Any comments on whether you think that I’m being a bit of wimp, please let me know!
According to McGee, an independent gallery in York run by Greg & Ails McGee, has turned photographs of pictures of work of 1st year students into posters, which are now hanging in the Fossgate Social, and Greg & Ails also gained an piece the local paper, York Press – many thanks to them.
Liz O Connell’s work is the delightful yellows, greens and red, mine is the edge of bowl [the photo is in a Vimeo clip on the earlier blog on raising bowls], Tom Child’s poster is of the wooden bowl held aloft by swirls of metal, and Jan Easton’s poster shows the wonderful colours that can occur when soldering [sorry the pictures aren’t the best].
It is often said that we live in our “own little bubbles”. Indeed, on the internet, search engines tailor results of searches to fit better with your previous searches [please see Eli Pariser’s TED talk “Beware of online filter bubbles”]. So if we’re all in bubbles, and you bring bubbles together, they form a foam.
I have tried ideas about making solid foams [dehydrating sucrose with concentrated sulphuric acid – dangerous but great to watch], making foams with some clay, using alternatives to bubbles and most recent relies on golf balls. A guy called Plateau came up with rules about how bubbles fit together – regardless of size – but the rules sort of apply to close packed golf balls. Surfaces of three bubbles meet at 120 degrees and these “edges’ so to speak, form a tetrahedron. Same stuff sort of happens with packing golf balls tightly together, the spaces in between the balls follow the 120 deg and tetrahedron layouts. Each ball “kisses” 12 others and the points of kissing have a great deal of symmetry though the packing. Here are my plaster casts and I have drilled out the kiss points to open up the structure.
Ed, our terrific course leader, suggested maybe trying ping pong balls as they might be cut out with less damage to the cast. 150 of ’em should arrive tomorrow! Great, lots to play with but there is the problem that ping pong balls float very well. Almost there for catching up. More soon, Vincent
My thoughts on social networks quickly turned to the net part of the word ‘internet’. So, I explored how to craft nets and found stuff ranging from natives of Northern Canada using birch bark and gut or sinew to make nets to YouTube “How To…” videos of making nets by hand. First get your netting needle – so I made one out of a bit of wood that was to hand and tried making nets following the videos BUT it is very difficult!
There is a knack to getting the knot to tie in just the right place over the preceding loop – otherwise what you thought was a knot just slides up and down on the previous loop and all consistency in mesh size [technical term to size of holes] disappears. Moreover, the small bits of net I did make – and they were small – were of a large mesh size that wouldn’t translate to a trophy.
Before we move on to making more nets, I had considered getting loads of small railway modellers’ figures and making a mould of them interlinked – each body like the knot of a net – but I abandoned that idea as a bit twee. Then I though of making a big net needle – and here’s where making yourself vulnerable comes in – as the trophy…
…but as you can see it does not merit further consideration [whilst the little bodies was a bit twee, this idea of a large netting needle is crass!].
What if I make a net of smaller mesh size? It will need a thin net needle and that will need to be long so that it can carry enough twine to make net without having to stop and reload it. Here is that needle before [a new kitchen spatula], “naked”, and loaded with green twine and with my hand for scale plus some net too.
Jill had a little better success in making net but it was still of too large a mesh and hard to construct. Moreover, I’d have to get any into a more solid form to be part of a trophy or work out how to make it “hang” successfully as part of a trophy.
Looks like two more blogs and we’ll have caught up on the Trophy project and the course! That hasn’t taken long has it? Vincent
