Bronze Casting, Returning my Work to the Landscape and Drawing with Sound Vibrations.

Looking back to my original clay ‘Sound Sculptures’, and responding to the feedback of others, I found that they evoked the desire to touch, handle and look closely at each curve and fingerprint mark left in their clay.

Sound Sculptures close up

I wanted this to be a possibility of these pieces without the sculptures becoming damaged over time from handling. When thinking of ways to make them more durable and suitable for handling the idea of casting in a metal arose. I then cast two bronze ‘Sound Sculptures’ to test out this idea. To do this I could not simply mould the bronze with my hands like I had done with the clay, and also could not cast the actual clay sculptures in bronze as the clay would simply get fired and not be replaced by the bronze. To solve this issue I sculpted two pieces of Plasticine in response to sounds in the same way that I did with the clay previously. For these pieces I blindly sculpted to the sound of 26 footsteps in two different locations, Arwenack Street and Woodlane, producing a physical document of those particular sounds at that particular time. These Plasticine ‘Sound Sculptures’ were then cast in bronze and cleaned up.

Progress Photos of Bronze Casts

Though bronze was clearly not the original material that I sculpted with my hands, its much more solid, unyielding nature, and the permanence that this material implies gives these bronze pieces, and the particular sound they embody a much greater significance than their clay counterparts. The greater mass of these sculptures explores the idea of giving a sound (a weightless, intangible energy) a weight, emphasising my concept of giving sound a tangible, physical form.

The Weight of 26 Steps on Woodlane, bronze

The Weight of 26 Steps on Arwenack Street, bronze

I then explored the idea of returning my completed series of ‘Sound Carvings’ plaster casts to the beach, where they were originally based upon. This was intended to be simply an interesting way of photographing these works, however the images turned out to be hugely evocative and became an exploration and a series of works in themselves.

Sixteen Waves in situ

These casts, these embodiments of the sounds of the waves, were back next to the live, real sounds of the waves; something I feel played a huge part in their evocativeness. The space, light and nature of the beach location allowed me greater scope to play with than in my studio. I explored composition and structure in the display of these casts as a whole collective, in small groups and individually, in an extension of my previous grid/non-grid structure study.

These images later inspired the way that I laid out these pieces in my studio for assessment. I laid a layer of sand gathered on this trip on top of some canvas fabric on the floor. I then arranged the ‘Sixteen Waves’ casts on top of my recreated beach in a grid structure, as I had previously discovered that this layout was most effective in giving each cast space, as well as allowing the fluidity of the hollows of the casts to stand out against the linear overall structure.

I also revisited my simplified DIY Chladni Plate, with the aim of creating a drawing using the sound vibrations. I could then compare this machine-made sound drawing to my own very human ones.

This took a lot of trial and error. I had initially planned to use the clay fragments like before, but slightly wetting them with sea water so that when they moved over the speaker due to the sound vibrations, they would ‘draw’. This idea did not work the water made the clay too heavy and sticky to be able to be lifted by simply the vibrations of the sound.

Some failed attempts at drawing with sound vibrations

I slightly altered my approach, using coarse sand coated in a mixture of the found clay and sea water which acted as an ink. This idea did work, not as effectively as I had hoped but the sand did make marks on the paper over the speaker, making drawings comparable to my own hand drawn ones.

Some successful attempts at drawing with sound vibrations

The jerky, abstract style of these machine-made ‘Sound Drawings’ was actually rather similar to my hand drawn pieces, despite coming from a completely different process. This exploration of human vs machine in an exploration of the balance between art and science is something that I will continue with in my practice in the future, deepening this research to give my work greater credibility. I plan to begin this more in depth exploration during a residency at Porthmeor Studios, St Ives during July.