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 startup urth.io and climatefood.com.au