Latest pictures from the foundry, my three thirds of the woven wax sculpture are now safely surrounded with plaster and heading to the kiln.
It’s scary to think that all that hard work is going to be melted, but the voids left behind will make the all important mould in which to pour the molten bronze.

Investment of the woven wax sculpture

The woven wax sculpture is now in the safe hands of the experts of Pangolin Editions down in Stroud, were they are working their magic turning the wax into bronze. I will be posting images as the process progresses, the first batch following this post are of the initial investment process were the wax is first sectioned with thin walls of metal. The metal walls will aid the sculpture being split down into sections just like breaking a Chocolate Orange! As the wax sculpture has been woven at full size and the weave is so intricate they will be using the vacuum chamber to draw the moulten bronze through the voids in the cast.

Once the metal walls are in place the wax is covered with a casting material to create the hard shell around the wax, this will go in the kiln and heat up to a high enough temperature that the wax will melt out of the cast. 

These are some new experiments with red wax using corn dollie weaving, using varying amounts of weavers creates some very different shapes.

The wax weaving got better today and has started to become stronger, then more disaster! My inflated beach ball started to deflate so I rushed out to buy a new pump and fixed that problem. Then I went home for tea and got a phone call from Rachel Helen, our resident Jeweller at the studio, to say my sculpture had just fallen off the work bench and the ball had deflated, feeling really stressed I rushed back to the studio and had to do some emergency fixing. Here you can see me looking pretty stressed cramming the ball with polystyrene chips in my rescue mission. The good news is that the wax sculpture survived the fall without too much damage. Lets hope tomorrow’s wax weaving goes more smoothly.

Disastrous start to the wax weaving! Weaving interlocking bands of wax has not worked. At first the bands were working well, weaving in each new band into the first, but then disaster struck after I’d covered half the surface of the sphere, the wax starting trying to be straight again and one after another began to snap.

Using thick sheets of plastic to try and keep in the heat, it caused a lot of static as you can see by my hair. @rachelsculpture

Setting up my temperature controlled work area within my studio space with a garden gazebo @rachelsculpture