In the past few weeks I have been working on smaller pieces so that I can experiment with surface color and texture. I started these vessels by creating a plaster mold from a glass vase that I had in my studio. The mold was of exactly half the vase, so, once I made two casts from it, I could piece them together into a hollow form. I made a few other molds from bottles and candlesticks I had around and ended up with a small collection of shapes that can all be combined into new vessels.

Once the plaster dried on my first group of pieces, I covered the surfaces with plain cotton fabric. For some, I then wet the fabric down and painted on ink washes to dye a color gradient. For others I heavily embroidered the surface with a mix of threads. I embedded plaster barnacles in a few and added beads to many of them. The ink wash was very unpredictable, so the effect was different on each piece.  I like that its organic nature replicates the effect of tidal cycles on man made objects. My goal is for these pieces to appear as if partially submerged in water over an indeterminate amount of them. They are hand-made relics washed ashore.

My hope is to apply some of these surface manipulations to my figurative sculptures in the coming months. You can see all this and more in person on the third floor of Gallery Aferro at the open studios this Saturday, April 1, 2017.