So, I took the train from Florence to Carrara to begin my two-week course in marble sculpting. I was met at the train station by Boutros Romhein, sculptor, owner and instructor of Arco Arte, where I would be learning to carve marble. His English, though poor, was much better than my Italian, so conversation was kept simple, but when it came to sculpting, he was able to demonstrate concepts and techniques with no problem.
The class was divided into two groups, those who were learning the traditional, manual method and those who were using power tools. I had chosen to learn the manual way first, thinking that it would be best to start at the beginning and learn to use power tools in the future. Already having used many of the power tools on metal, I expect I will have no trouble adapting their use to stone, but the manual tools I had not used previously.
There were three of us learning manually (Francesco, Henry and I) and two (Dominico and Julia) who were using power tools in the class. In addition, we shared space with two others (Helga and Marcello) who were staying over a few days from the previous course to finish their pieces. This gave us an opportunity to see what the finished product could look like.
The first day we decided what we would sculpt and chose our marble. My plan was to choose something relatively simple and traditional (a torso) and also to make sure it would be small enough to carry on the return flight in my hand luggage. I created a maquette (a small model) from clay to use as a reference and chose a block of marble.
Our first step was to square up the bottom of the piece so it could stand up on the surface of our workstations. This involved learning the use of the Subbie (sue-bee-a) a pointed chisel designed to chip away the stone. Used with a lightly weighted hammer (400 or 500g) a skilled sculptor can remove a lot of stone in a short amount of time. Needless to say, it took pretty much all day for us to square up our stones.
Next we took off the excess marble, still using our Subbie. When we had rough shapes made, we turned to another chisel called a Gradine (grah-dee-na). This chisel has teeth on the end in a zig-zag pattern. This chisel takes off a fair amount of stone without really chipping and allows you to shape the form.
Once the rough form is done, it is a matter of using the Scalpello and the Scalpello Tondo or flat and rounded chisels to carve and smooth the marble. Using these tools we continued to refine our shapes until they were ready to sand. Sanding began with stones from old grinding wheels in 30 and 60 grit. At this stage you can continue to do a bit more shaping, and I occasionally returned to my chisels to define areas that weren’t working.
After rough sanding, we switched to paper and continued sanding with 120, 220, 400, 600 and 800 grit until the surface was smooth and fairly shiny. The final step was to rub a coating of Oxalic Acid on the surface and then wash that off with water after a couple minutes. The Oxalic Acid reacts with the surface of the marble causing it to crystallise and create a shinier shine. Sadly, it can’t make unsanded marble shine, so all those days of sanding remain necessary.
During these two weeks, we had the weekend off and as a group we took one afternoon to visit the quarries in the mountains above Arco Arte. During one of my days off, I walked down the road into Carrara, about 2 km away, and back. It was a nice walk and I was able to see a little bit of Carrara which I found quite charming. In Carrara, they use marble for everything. Walls are marble clad, benches are marble, even the sidewalks are made of marble. If it wasn’t so common around here, it would look like conspicuous consumption. Here in Carrara, though, marble is simply the available building material and its just a bonus that it looks so good.
Our trip to the quarries was fascinating. We went to the Cava Museo, the quarry museum, which is a sculpture garden with pieces created by Boutros 25 years ago, documenting the history of the quarries. The museum was conceived and created by Walter Danesi who researched the history and techniques of the quarrymen. We then went into Fantascritti, an amazing quarry carved directly into the mountain. Save for a lack of rank on rank of carved columns, it reminded me of the Mines of Moria and I expected orcs to come swarming through any minute.
Here are a few more photos showing the quarries of Carrara.
The past couple of week, I have been working with a new (to me) product called Jesmonite. It is a gypsum-based acrylic resin compound that, like other resins, accepts fiberglass reinforcement to provide strength and stability, and best of all is water-based– so no messy chemical cleanup. I purchased AC-300, which is rated for long term indoor use and brief outdoor use, and is also much less expensive than the other mixtures. It hardens quickly and with reinforcement, becomes very sturdy.
The procedure is fairly simple. Since I have open molds, I am making a fiberglass laminate rather than a solid piece. There are basically 3 layers of Jesmonite in the laminate along with two of woven fiberglass. The first layer is plain Jesmonite, laid in with a paintbrush. This is called the gel coat and will become the exterior layer. Next, while the gel coat is still tacky, you place in a layer of woven fiberglass. The next layer is Jesmonite mixed with chopped fiberglass strands, then another layer of woven fiberglass. Finally another layer of plain Jesmonite is painted in on top of that.
Like other resin products, you can add pigment to color the Jesmonite or you can add other fillers to try to simulate different materials, or you can paint the final result. My intention was to use powdered metals to simulate cast metal; this process is called “cold casting” since you don’t need to heat the metal. Other available materials include granite, marble and sandstone. AllScot, the company from whom I purchased the Jesmonite, had several powdered metals to choose from and being the skinflint that I am, I bought the least expensive, iron and aluminum.
So far I made three casts using Jesmonite and have been generally pleased with the outcome. My initial cast was done in order to get a feel for the process. This came out pretty well, although some areas failed to cast due to air pockets. This was operator error, though and not a fault of the Jesmonite. My next two, I attempted to use the metal powders. I adjusted the proportions according to the instructions, but the Jesmonite was quite thick this time and I practically had to trowel it into the mold, rather than paint it. The final results were not quite what I wanted; upon reading further I discovered that the AC300, although it will work with the metal powders, it has a lower resin content than the others (hence the cheaper price) and therefore does not achieve the same effect.
I then ordered some pigments and am hoping to get those casts underway this week.
In the meantime, I have sculpted and am molding one more piece and should have that completed this week as well, giving me a total of three masks for this semester.
Below are some photos of my first attempts working with Jesmonite. The blocks in the foreground are hot-melt vinyl which I am using to mold the latest mask. More on that later.
Last weekend was the Huntly Hairst, an annual harvest/halloween festival held in the town Huntly, the seat of Lord Gordon, Earl of Huntly from the 14th to 17th centuries. The town itself is rather small, housing about 4500 people but we really only saw a tiny portion of it, mainly from the square to the castle. The trip was considered a workshop, coordinating with Deveron Arts, the local arts organization, to provide assistance with the Hairst in the form of games and activities, and assisting with food and drink.
We left on Friday morning, a group of fourteen of us plus Neil as our driver, in a minivan with fifteen seats and no actual storage space. Bags and such were crammed in the aisle and under seats wherever they would fit. We were crammed into the seats. Dosed with Kwells (UK Dramamine), I loaded myself in and prepared for a long trip.
Loaded up and ready to goNeil, our stalwart driver
The trip there followed the Whiskey Trail, through the Cairngorms then down into Huntly. The weather was changeable; by the time we hd arrived, Neil had driven through sun, rain, fog, hail, and snow. The scenery was amazing, all the autumn colors were out, with the trees clad in gold, red, bronze, yellow and every color in between.
We stopped once, for lunch, along the way, in Pitlochry in Perthshire. Pitlochry is the home to Heathergems, a company whose jewelry is very popular at Celtic Shoppes in the US. The town itself is a very nice, quaint Scottish town which clearly caters to travelers and tourists. It was a very welcome relief from the travel and a nice place to visit.
We arrived in Huntly in the early evening amidst a light snow and settled into our accommodations at the Highlander Bunkhouse. Since the snow had stopped, a group of us went out to scout Huntly Castle, the location where Saturday’s events began.
Huntly Castle from the frontThe rear of Huntly CastleAnother view of the rear of Huntly Castle
Later in the evening, we went to the Freaky Folk Night at the Crown Arms Pub, heard some music from locals, Eoin and Allysson Velez a Brazilian musician here at Deveron Arts’ behest, and drank some beer.
Freaky Folk Night, a mix of locals and ECAers.
Saturday we went to a talk and tour by Deveron Arts leader Claudia Zeiske. She spoke about the concept for Deveron Arts, their theme The Town is the Venue and the artists and projects they’ve hosted. Deveron Arts uses what they call a 50/50 approach. Their website explains it as “50 per cent community/locality and 50 per cent artistic criticality/globality is [the] paradigm that needs to be met through a variety of ways of working.” This means that they try to engage the community in a number of ways, and try to create artworks or events that help the community in some manner.
Deveron Arts has published a book, ARTocracy, explaining this approach and how it can be utilized in towns throughout the world. I can easily see this working in towns and villages in Alaska, as well as other places in the US.
After the talk, she took us on a tour of the town as a venue. Although some of the artwork on display were finished pieces, some were more like memorabilia of an event that did not have an actual product to display. The shops in the town displayed these pieces with pride, though and the shop owners clearly had some fond memories of the time the artists spent with them.
Claudia on tour, in Orb’s Bookshop
We’d been told that during the weekend, there would be an European Market being held in the square. I’m afraid I had rather grand visions of this, thinking of something at least like the farmer’s market near my home in Edinburgh, with produce stalls and breads and meats and such. No, the European Market was a small number of stalls, which consisted of Coffee, hot food (Potatoes Provencal, Paella, Asian Noodles, and maybe one or two other things. There were some other foods, pastries, olives and dry sausages, but that’s all I can recall. Not much you would really want to buy and bring home, just some stuff you might eat during the festivities, which were really only Saturday evening, although I expect the coffee vendor did well.
The European Market from one end…and the other
Some of us grabbed lunch at the European Market and then headed back to the bunkhouse until later that afternoon when we would need to set up. During this lull, Rima made a delicious pumpkin soup for dinner later, while we assisted by chopping onions and hollowing the pumpkins and making Jack-O-Lanterns. Afternoon came and one group went down to the castle to help Simon with the food (if you feel like I’m not being complete, review this previous Hairst post), serve the cider and help Darren with his performance, while the group I was with started setting up in the square.
Prepping Pumpkin Soup
We were provided with a gazebo (pop-up awning) which we set up at one end of the Market (in fact, right where the previous photo was taken). Unfortunately, two of the legs were mildly broken, so setting up became a bit of a kludge; in order to keep two of the legs from collapsing, we inserted a pen in one and a nail in the other where there were supposed to be pins to hold them. Then we arranged the tables and began decorating and setting up games. By the time things were supposed to start, we were all set and headed down to the castle to watch the beginning of the festivities.
One of the Jack-O-Lanterns at our stall.
Down at the castle,  we watched the events unfold. Simon had a table where he was serving the first of his Huntly Signature Dishes, a Steak and Ale Pie sourced from local ingredients and served in a sort of Nouveau Cuisine style. In a paper cup/bowl, were (as near as I could tell) mashed potatoes, a gravy with steak bits in it, all topped with a tiny biscuit representing the crust. It was tasty, but I found the biscuit dry since it was the first thing I ate, in the dark, without it having time to soak up any gravy. Perhaps this dish will work better in less al fresco setting.
Georgia, Tim, Brian, Mike and Eoin were here serving the cider, Thistly Cross‘ Bloody Good Brew, developed by Brian, Mike and Eoin, from a heated tureen, and generally helping out Simon and Darren. Soon enough, Darren’s performance art piece began, with spooky music and bizarre imagery.
Darren’s “Sound Installation” and performance.
Although it was interesting to us art students, the crowd, which mainly consisted of small children and their parents, seemed to find it a bit perplexing and drawn out.
We were then presented with a drum solo by Deveron Arts’ guest artist from Brazil, Allysson Velez, wearing a stag mask while spotlighted with his shadow thrown up on the castle wall. Around 7:00, when he had finished, it was time for masked members of the pipe band to begin their annual march from the castle to the square.
Allysson VelezThe pipe band marching from Huntly Castle
We raced ahead in order to get back to our stall before the crowds, and so we could fetch the last of the supplies from the bunkhouse. So, when we were finished setting up, we realized two things: first that it was starting to rain and second that we were the only new booth in the square. Since they had previously told us that they were going to get the European Market packed up and gone by six (fortunately, they decided to let them stay until after the parade) we were a bit surprised, to say the least. There was a performance by Ceilidhamba, the samba band that Allysson had assembled, Dudendance (which I did not see), and by the local Chimera Belly Dancers, in the rain by our stall.
Meanwhile, the rain had put a damper (ha!) on some of our activities, specifically gathering recipes or “last meal” details from locals, since no one wanted to sit in the rain long enough to participate. We had also planned on drawing or having locals draw their last meals on paper plates, but the rain made the markers useless.
On the other hand, before the rain got too bad, we had some interest in our two games, The Unlucky Dip and The Hanging Baker, as well as the face painting. The Unlucky Dip was two small bins filled with different muck. One held cooked spaghetti and the other semi-solidified jello (or jelly as they say here). There were also a number of tokens (plastic spiders and such) in each. The goal was to reach in and pull out a token in order to win a piece of candy. It was really quite popular, simply, I think, because kids like to stick their hands in goop.
The Hanging Baker was a variation on the apple-on-a-string game. Originally we conceived it to be donuts hanging on strings, but after consultation with Simon, it was decided that he would find a more appropriately local pastry. Trying to name it without knowing specifically what pastry would be used was difficult and we ended up with the rather generic sounding Hanging Baker. 
We ended up using Butteries, which are flat, salty, mildly flaky rolls. Since our vision was to make this not only difficult, but messy, Erin made up a frosting using confectioner’s sugar, golden syrup and raspberry jam which looked vile but tasted ok. Since we were unable to set up a pole or line to hang the butteries from, we used a broomstick, making it look like we were Child Catchers fishing for little children. The kids seemed to enjoy the game, but actually preferred to eat the butteries without frosting.
The face-painters did a brief but booming business, but we were rained out by 7:30 and the square was empty.
During some down time, I had Tonia paint my face. Fashion by Phil, Make-Up by Tonia.
 After that short flurry of activity, it was time to take everything down. We cleaned up and put the gazebo and tables back where we got them and took the rest back to the bunkhouse. At 8:00 the Ceilidh began, but we decided dinner was more important. We ate the pumpkin soup Rima had prepared and ate it with leftover butteries. Delicious.
After dinner, we went to the meeting hall and joined the ceilidh. There were traditional ceilidh activities, a raffle, drinking, and of course, dancing. The music was provided intermittently, by different arrangements of local musicians. There were performances by Allysson, a performance by Ceilidhama, and a duet between Allysson on drums and a piper, as well as performances by the local ceilidh band of fiddlers and such.
Erin, Paige, Tonia, Allie, and Eildh At the CeilidhBrian and Klaas at the Ceilidh
The next morning, a handful of us were up early and decided to take a walk up to the castle. We followed the trail a little beyond the castle, crossed the river Deveron and wandered along the river briefly before turning back. On the way back, we passed an empty playground and determined it should not remain so.
Another view of Huntly CastleThe river Deveron from the footbridgePlay makes play
When we returned, everyone was up and getting ready to go. We cleaned up, packed, loaded the van and were on our way again. This time our route took use south to Dundee where we stopped for lunch and art.
‘LolCats’ is set in a mutable space, at once a mysterious lost civilization and a modern day touristic fun park, referencing an amalgam of past and present manifestations of cat worship. The video centres on a female character, presenting her in moments of fear, intrigue, mutation and decay as she journeys through this erratic environment. Constantly shifting genres, the film depicts her at one moment as a tourist or adventurer, next as a musical performer and then shifting context to become a motionless object, doll or product.
-from Rachel Maclean’s website
I wish there had been more time for me to watch the video from start to finish, and look forward to being able to see it on her website in the future.
We finally returned to ECA near to 5:00PM on Sunday, and everyone was so excited to be home that we all unloaded and disappeared within a matter of minutes.
Here are a all my photos of the trip. Since we did not know the security of the Bunkhouse, I decided not to take my camera with, so all the photos are from my iPhone. If you want some better images, see Mike’s Tumblr page.
I’ve spent the past two days in a workshop at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, led by Susie Green an artist and musician from Newcastle. There were fifteen of us, and we worked generally in groups of three to first create a set of prompts, then to create artwork from those prompts, then to create artwork inspire by the first set of artwork and finally to arrange and curate the show.
The workshop started with some homeworkРon our way to ECA, we were each to note five of  the things around us. The list was:
1. An architectural detail of a building.
2. An outfit/pattern/item of clothing seen on themselves or another.
3. A name of a shop/street name.
4. An overheard conversation/a regular thought had (if no conversations get heard).
5. The feeling of the ground beneath their feet.
We first presented these to the entire group, then we broke into our trios and cut our lists into five separate items. We then mixed and matched those to create a tone-poem or three (some groups kept the five line format,others did not). These again were read to the entire group, and as presented they felt very much like finished works in and of themselves.
Our next step was to work on artwork inspired by the text. First, we moved to another group’s prompts, so we were not using our own original prompts or poems. Then we were provided with a minimal amount of supplies (paper, markers, tape, glue, paints) and started work. Some people used one phrase, others more. The final products were primarily 2-D pieces that mounted on the wall, although there were a could of pieces that extended into space.
We admired each other’s work and then moved again. Now we were to create artwork using someone else’s piece as inspiration, or as a maquette. These works were to be larger, as monumental as we could make them using the supplies at hand. We got more supplies (cardboard, plastic sheeting, a large roll of paper, some wood) and got started.
In this phase, we were working in our trios and trying to come together on one concept, rather than in the previous step where we worked in trios but were not so concerned about integrating with each other’s work. This ended up producing not just large, but some nearly monumental works.
When we were finally finished for the day, we had produced poems, maquettes and finished artworks all within the span of a few hours.
Tuesday we reviewed what we had done the previous day and then spent some time considering how we could present and possibly enhance or finish yesterday’s work. We obtained some lights and mounted them, using some to lit the artwork on one side of the room and the thirdrot project a silhouette using one of Monday’s artworks. ¬†The wall onto which we projected the silhouette was covered with the phrases we had cut up on Monday, while our curatorial ideas (which we had drawn out) were hung on a beam above.
I really enjoyed this workshop. Using seemingly mundane and unrelated thoughts as a starting point and joining them to spark inspiration was different than the way I normally work. Then using one artwork to inspire and inform a new one, although not unfamiliar, was done in an unique way. Having to create artwork with extremely limited resources and materials I would never have chosen also made the challenge more interesting.
On Thursday and Friday, another group will be using the same space for a different but related workshop. What we created on Monday and Tuesday could easily be used by them as raw materials or inspiration. On Saturday, we all come back together to view the space again and finish the workshop. I wonder what it will be by then…
Toward the end of the month,  I will be among a group of ECA students who will be assisting and participating in the Huntly Hairst, an annual harvest festival in the village of Huntly, up north in Aberdeenshire.
There will be around fifteen of us and we’ll be in three groups. The idea is that one group will be helping with the games, another with the food and the third with the cider (in association with Thistly Cross Cider).
We will be working primarily with Deveron Arts, a local, contemporary arts organization that is a major sponsor of the festival. The festival will tie in to their current project with Simon Preston, The Town is the Menu. Simon is currently working “with local people to unearth Huntly’s food identity and to create and adopt a Signature Menu for the town”.
We’ve had only one meeting on this so far, and it is still very sketchy. More meetings are coming up, so stay tuned.
