Nature Contained and Nature Escaping - or Knights and Dragons

Oh Dear!

Another rainy Stavanger day :-(

Everything is so wet and everywhere you go you get wet.

One small blessing is that I have no workmen outside crashing and banging, so it is a reasonably peaceful day except for all the excitement going on in this house.

I have been very busy today and very encouraged by the work that is really starting to grow beneath my fingers. I started a new medal late last week and I can't wait to finish it now and show it to you - it is still not ready but being me I already have the idea for my next medal fermenting in my brain. i won't tell you what it is about just yet, that will be a surprise. But I am really happy with the development at the moment.

Because of my lack of facilities, the medals I am making here are only a model - made from a wonderful modelling material which i discovered a few years back, called SuperSculpey. It has a really nice texture for getting fine detail and then when you have finished your medal you can bake it in the oven and it cures to a hard plastic which still has a bit of flexibility in it which works very well for me.

I make each medal in two halves - that is, the obverse and the reverse. After they are baked I glue the two sides together and gently sand the edges back to smooth them off. However, when they bake they tend to curl up at the edges but owing to that flexibility, when I glue the two sides together they can be bent back and cancel each other out - if you catch my drift!

I will take these medals with me when i move to Spain and the first thing I need to do there is find a good art supplies shop where I can buy some silicon rubber to make moulds with. Once I have moulds of the medals I can start casting and editioning and hopefully selling my new body of work. I will also have something new to take with me to the next BAMS conference (which is in Cardiff next year.)

I used the image above in one of my previous experimental medals (do your remember the ones that i cast in clear resin) - it was initially an idea for a large sculpture to be sited on a motorway somewhere in Ireland (i did not win that commission) - I cannot remember the location now. I rather liked the idea of nature escaping from the man made landscape. It contrasts the rather untidy, organic forms with a more angular, tidy form to represent how man tries to contain nature, but rarely succeeds.

I like that - I like the fact that nature will be the eventual winner over man's stupidity and shortsightedness. Unfortunately i will probably not be here either when the battle is all over.

But right now i am here and feeling very optimistic for my immediate future and the next phase of Mary at Large!