Spring 2024

Spring semester at UNF found me back in Sculpture class.

The first project of the semester was more plaster carving. I really like the carving part of sculpture because it gives you the ability to discover what’s inside a bare block. I used smaller buckets this time around since the 70 lb block of plaster is pretty heavy to rock and roll around on the workbench. I continued with the high flow acrylic paint as an additive to get color. It took a lot of paint but the color still didn’t make it all the way to the bottom of the bucket. When you see the blue “jar” in the pics, you can see the strip effect that came up when I used a tool to shove the color down the side. The most saturated blue is actually the top of the bucket of plaster. The lid, which was cut off the main block, was at the bottom of the barrel. It is a very pale blue.

I followed up plaster carving with stone carving.

I spent almost a year carving a hibiscus at DFAC, using a hammer and chisel and brute force. Since I didn’t finish that stone, I decided it was worth another try… because – pneumatics! I found a pretty Mexican marble (orange calcite) stone and started to beat it up. The original plan was an open-mouth clam shell. The rock was really trying to be a horse. It demonstrated this by cracking at just the right point to shed important bits of the clam shell. At this point, I switched to the wire wheel to remove the rest of the cracked bits and attacked the rock die-grinder and some big burrs. We (the horse and I) compromised on Dragon Falls, which finally emerged.

We ended the semester again with the iron pour.

The early April weather cooperated by being cool. I started with a flower design that needed to be executed in wax. With the on/off switch located on the wax pot, and began pouring wax flower petals onto the stainless steel table. Oops. The stainless table would not release the wax. So I found a heat gun and proceeded to scrape the wax back off the table. Fast forward 2 hours. My originally intended flower wound up back in the wax pot; the wax scrapings I’d been piling up on the table had much more personality than the overworked flower.

Because the abstract iron form resembled barnacles, I used a naturally neon sea anemone I photographed at the National Zoo as inspiration for the mixed media piece. It was painted with “interference blue” acrylic paint and set under blue lights to get a neon glow. One student remarked that it looked like there were blue crystals growing out of the sculpture.