The making of the marble…
making the clay original is where it all starts … the dreaming begins this was to be the easy part…
Before finding my piece of marble I searched the earth itself in my home country visiting the marble fields of Chiligoe in Queensland where the visible signs of the earth molten with sea creatures lie fossilised in pink.
The waves of marble sang to me and I longed to lie against the earth and listen to her song. I dreamed in the stillness and felt the waves of history…
But the colours were not pure enough for the image I saw floating in my mind… so I moved on and through another female sculptor I eventually found my Portuguese Rosa a glasslike marble so fine it was to be challenging to carve!
The truck arrives… so excited
This is the beautiful block of Portuguese Pink marble I finally settled on arriving at the studio after a year of searching - so excited!
Standing on my marble feeling the cool beauty surging through my body as I placed the plaster maquette on the block to mark out the form was the start of an exciting adventure I had waited ten years to afford!
Next would begin the long process of marking the block in the same way it has been done since before Michaelangelo’s time! Not much had changed except the use of power tools to cut with.
After casting the clay into plaster it is placed with tools as to be marked on the marble in the same way the first piece I did in Italy in the studio Michaelangelo carved in! Sadly that same studio was shut down recently and a piece of history also…
First a series of points are made to establish “ground zero”
These are then marked on the marble and big slices are sawn off with a diamond saw to the depth required.
then the hard chiselling begins to remove the slices.
This is a full days’ carving with three of us working on it to make a small dent on the marble. It is really hard work.
the exciting part is when it starts to take form
Standing her up after 2 weeks of blocking out with the help of some big muscles to handle the impact I began on the real part of the art of marble. From now it takes the months of refinement with drills, and then sanding with many small stones and finally degrees of sandpaper til it feels like skin. This took me a further 6 months!
Many moons later standing in the wind and rain polishing her she is finally finished and transported to her new home in my bush gallery in rural Victoria Australia, Sedgwick. One part of a triptych the body the spirit and the mind I will spend a good 15 years making in total. All while single parenting two beautiful young men and working to find a way to help the earth balance in my environmental startups urth.io and climatefood.com.au
The next chapter is on the way having ow spent many years trialling different expressions in fibreglass, words etched in glass, with mythical renditions that symbolise the mind. I have finally settled on coming full circle back to Rodin for inspiration. Looking to his “Thinker” from Dante’s “Gates of Hell” piece where all of human suffering is represented in this unfinished work of his. Ironically, I may too never finish this work as my body nears 60 years of age and the tremendous difficulty to carve and polish the final part out of the remaining blocks of marble calls to me and yet makes me shrink for the labour ahead! For now, the bronze supports are made and the third or maybe a fourth draft of the glass figure has been hung which I am now tweaking again and looking to recast a bit larger and lay small strips of light colour as if the glass in the second stage of the spirit is imposing and drifting in its influence to the mind piece.
The thinker takes form for the triptych section on the mind
the glass and bronze sections
As the glass will be lit from within with the transcript of the book dust and dreams being read by me motion sensored Im still muddling with how it will look…
