Progress: Mould Making

A few photos to show you how the mould-making is going. I finished the clay accordian form and here I'm building the surrounds, ready to pour the plaster. There's clay on the outside if the boards to stop leaks, and also between the form and the boards on the inside so the edges will be neat. That's the worst part in my opinion, as it's so fiddly to make it really smooth.




Here the form is fully surrounded. You'll notice I stuffed up slightly - I didn't put the boards together properly, so the last "wall" was too small for my boards. Never mind, I just used clay. In retrospect that might have worked better for all four sides because it was much easier to push the wall onto the form and make a neat join. I have seen clay walls collapse mid-pour....resulting in rapidly setting plaster all over the floor...so I usually go for the boards. I'll have to give this more thought if I end up doing more of these.

Below: the plaster setting....no leaks, YAY!

And the mould fresh out of the surrounds. You can see the end where the clay wall was - it's a bit wonky and has sharp edges, but they can be smoothed out. You can probably also see how untidy the sides are - that's where I used extra clay to join onto the boards. Tomorrow I'll do some cleaning up and take another picture. Hopefully it'll be a lot smoother and ready to go!

A Clay Concertina Spine

If you've been wondering about the outcome of the firing I mentioned in my last post, it was only so so. It turned out that there were eight pages without cracking, but they weren't my "best" ones, so I decided to make some more and then make my selection.

While they were drying I made a start on the second porcelain book I want to make. It will be a flag book, and the whole idea is to play with the idea of the moving flags. If you're not sure what a flag book looks like, my book "Like Weather" is an example. By making the entire book from porcelain, with no hinges or joints of any material at all, the flags will be immobile.

I have to confess that except when absolutely necessary, I avoid mould making and casting my work for one simple reason. I don't enjoy the process. But there are times when it really is the best way to make a form, and the concertina spine in a flag book is one of those times. Joining all those 1 inch wide slabs and getting the angles just right, would be a very tedious process and highly inclined to cracking and inaccuracy. By making a mould, there is the opportunity to re-use it in the future, to make more concertina spines if this one turns out well.

First step is making the desired shape in clay. Here's a sketch from my visual diary to show you what I am setting out to do.
I made a rectangular block of clay and I am carving out the V-shapes at the angles shown. I've made a couple of jigs at the correct angles from old credit cards to help. Here's a photo of my progress so far.



Surprise! Surprise! I am actually enjoying this part of the process! This is as far as I made it because unfortunately late last week I had a migraine. It is taking me a couple of days to get my brain functioning again, but hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to finish shaping the clay.

This week I've also done some work on a couple of my trip photos. I've posted the results on my flickr photostream, if you are interested.