The art of casting: 11 weeks to make it right

Casting is an incredibly complicated process from start to finish. This in particular is lost wax casting using a ceramic shell process, which is in itself a little more complicated than normal. When I was making this sculpture, the most important thing for me first was to conceptualize what I was making. I listened to the song, made a bunch of sketches. From there, it was about trying to turn those 2D sketches into a 3D shape. In the School of Visual Arts, we do not typically work on one project for 11 weeks. That's a very unique opportunity. The things that students learn in this process is that you have to sort of answer to yourself of the past. They're saying, “Well, why did I have to make it that way? That makes today so much more difficult than it had to be.” That is the only way you really pick up any of that stuff is just going through the whole process. The students were asked to do a prompt. The prompt was, find a piece of instrumental music that's going to act as inspiration. Then we go to sketches. Then we do 3D sketches. From there, we have a pretty good idea of our form. Mostly everything I do is on InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Suite. This class allows me to get my hands dirty. And since it is a longer format project, it gave me a lot more time to sit and reflect on what I’m doing and kind of soak in the creative process. When it comes to doing a 3D thing, there's a lot of pre-planning that you have to think of in order to make a finished piece that I don't ever have to do usually. And for me, that was the surprising part when doing this project, because the time span that we had was so long and I was like, “Well, we're just making a sculpture. Like, how long could that take?” But really it encapsulates all these different aspects of the creative process that I don't usually have to deal with. Working on it, it was a lot of trial and error. My sculpture actually fell a couple times during the process, and that was a really big pain point. We had to go do quick repairs to see if we could salvage it. So just learning to kind of roll with the punches, especially in something this long, you only get one shot. You don’t know how heavy these things are going to be when you're working with clay. They're not really big pieces, so they feel small. And then to fill it with the aluminum later and then you lift it and it takes all your strength to lift it. I think that was really surprising for me. That experience of being able to be one of the people to actually help pour it was really exciting for me. That thing was heavy. Let me tell you what. It was hot. It was horrible. I felt like I was one of those guys just walking on the side of a volcano getting scientific readings. Even though it was kind of miserable in the moment, it was still a lot of fun and something that I've always wanted to do. So getting up-close experience with something that I'm so comfortable with seeing as strong and almost unbreakable for a normal human, to then see it as malleable and flexible as a liquid was kind of eye opening. I'd like to mention the importance of collaborating between departments, because I think that's another thing that really opens doors for the creative arts. The ability to go to this other place — I honestly didn’t even know it existed. And now I do, and it's something that I can participate in. I think that's a really important thing. We often talk in sculpture about permanence. Casting really exemplifies this more than anything. There's a preciousness that comes with all of this process. This 11-step process really makes you invest in the thing that you're making. I think it's really important as an artist to put your toes in everything, because all the different things that you experience in your art making — outside of your art making — things you read, things you watch, inspires you and informs the way you create things and the ideas and how you connect them to each other. The labor of love that is sculpting is different from making something on paper or making something on the computer. There's a physical aspect to it. You put a little bit of yourself into it.