I’m assisting sculptor Eric Johnson (above) as he completes Maize, a giant ear of corn with about 400 cast resin kernels, for his upcoming show at the Torrance Art Museum. These photos are from Saturday, March 29, when we did some test casts in his new gimbal that allows him to make 12 at a time. It takes a full working day to make these, and they need to be kept in almost constant motion as the 7-10 layers of polyester resin that make up each piece are poured and set, so the gimbal system is necessary for smooth production and quality control.
Eric is a massively inspiring guy to work with, and I worked with him again last Saturday, getting to be much more involved in the process (more photos on that later). I’ll be working with Eric as much as I can until the project is complete. A ton of guests are involved to make and design kernels of their own, more on that later.
Above – Eric working the gimbal. You can see the pin striping on the base of the gimbal, a serious blessing by local car club guru Borti Petrich (Borti drives a beautiful T-Bird, stock except for a frighteningly powerful stereo).
Above – Pouring the resin. I was mainly watching, as this was my first time on the project. This is trickier than it looks, since the gimbal very much wants to move around.
Above – After adding the first coat of red/orange resin, Eric rotates the gimbal around to get an even coat. Again, it’s trickier than it looks, especially when the coat you’re pouring in is pretty close in colour to the preceeding layers. About 3-4 coats of clear go in before the first coat of colour goes in.
Above – Six face one way, and six face the other, so we do six of the twelve at a time, while the other side finishes setting. Since this was the first test of the 12 mold system, Eric kept it simple, with six orange and six yellow. Most of the corn will be “corn coloured” even though a ton of awesomely non-corn coloured kernels are going to be made by guests. The final coat on these was an opaque white. The multiple layers of colour and clear give the final kernels insane depth.
Technorati Tags: Eric Johnson, sculpture, art, art making, documentation, process, resin, polyester resin, corn, Maize, kernels
Very cool — it’s neat to see the process, and must be a lot of fun to see how the kernels turn out.
FYI — here’s a homebrew powered rotomold machine…
http://www.solsylva.com/cnc/rotomold.html
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