Sculpture Day 3

It's funny that I made so much progress in a very short time on Monday, then today my sculpture seems to have not changed very much at all, despite having spent another whole day working on it.

I'm trying not to anthropomorphise it, but it does rather look like two funny little figures clinging on to each other in a strange dance....

It's not what I started out to do at all.  Here's a close-up of the surface.

Even if I'm getting nowhere, it's strangely satisfying to spend a day working like this, with my hands in a bucket of plaster, and chipping away at the form with a big scraper.

 

From this angle, they look more like fighting hares, and that's not good.  Tomorrow, the rabbit ears will have to go...this is a serious sculpture.  Behave yourselves.

It's been a hot day, and the big door of the workshop is open into the back lane.  There is a smell of unemptied bins, the sound of buzzsaws from the wood workshop across the way, the trains rattling on the track over the back wall.  Soulless drum and bass music plays across the back court, but is sometimes surprisingly interpersed by a distant song with a woman singing plaintively in an Eastern language, exotic and impassioned.

Everything is a bit grimy and dusty - even the clean bits.  There are children from the surrounding tenements who come to sit on the step of the workshop, and who chatter away in Romanian and pet Victoria's dog Marco.  Patient, good-natured Marco is the handsome model for Victoria's sculpture, which she's made with a metal armature and clay worked over the top.

 

Because the door is wide open, people come and go, drop in, borrow tools, make cups of tea, and chat about what's going on in the neighborhood.

Here's Marco the sandwich-snaffling, banana-loving model, and Marco the sculpture.  

Mary is sitting on the step with her sculpture, which is for a statue for her garden.  The figure is going to have ivy sprouting from the hands.  Made in clay, the figure has been encased in a plaster jacket to take a mould.  When hard, the plaster will have the clay removed from the centre, and the space filled with a durable material such as concrete or jesmonite, suitable for going outdoors. 

And so another day goes by.