Clachtoll Art Project – Bronze community sculpture

The other piece that I’ve been working on is a community sculpture.

Eighteen children from Lochinver primary have prepared designs and tried their hand at wax carving using local beeswax.

Most of the children also did sand piece-moulds to cast metals beads which we then made up into nettle-stringed necklaces. Thank-you to the people who supported me with this workshop.

I then cleaned up the waxes so that they would cast well; and using the same method as the children (2 part sand moulds), I cast the first sixteen mini sculptures in bronze. I have been cleaning these – cutting of the running system, filing them back, sanding and polishing them.

The Ullapool High school children who came to the broch helped run a copper smelt. The copper from that smelt was added to the bronze used for these mini sculptures. The high school pupils also cast pewter pieces using clay models that they had designed themselves.

The community sculpture has been growing with local people making mini sculptures.

At a public event on Stoer field we smelted some more copper, which will be used in casting these waxes in bronze (thanks, Nigel, Fiona and Boyd)

Many of the dig volunteers and other people involved with the broch have added their designs, so I have a further 24 waxes cleaned and prepared for casting.

The discussion on where they may be installed continues, but I hope they can be affixed to bedrock in a safe place near the broch.

The final public event at Glen Canisp on 16^th November 2018 will be to cast the final waxes for the sculpture (including copper from the public smelt). We also have a special request to demonstrate the alloying of copper with tin to give bronze. I hope to have more details of the event planning soon.

 

Clachtoll Broch – rock and fallen rock

My first impressions of the broch were of the majesty of the stonework and the rock bed that it is built on; and of the disorder of stones that had been part of the broch which fire, sea and time had scattered.

The bedrock falls to the sea and some of the stones from the broch have fallen this way. The archaeologists say that the broch collapsed in on itself , because the slope of the bedrock made the construction unstable. The recent work on the broch has included structural support and repair to the lintels to re-stabilise the building without embellishment. The work also included moving tonnes of fallen rock from within the building. This was all done by hand as there is no vehicular access to the site.

The stone double wall of the broch that once towered above the surrounding landscape has been in ruins since the time of Christ.

This mini re-cap gives some of the reasoning behind my decision to create an iron piece that is cast from one of the lintels at the site. It is still not certain that I will be able to do this this season as the weather seems to have turned autumnal, but that is the plan. I’ll keep you posted.

Stone to Bowl grand finale

Last week was my final week of work at Scottish Sculpture Workshop on my VACMA funded Stone to Bowl copper project.

It focused on getting the bellows organised so that I can work anywhere in the landscape. Monday was spent fixing the blower which had arrived fractured. Eden Jolly did most of the work as it involved tig welding, but I did the cleaning of the joins and offered cups of tea. Eden and Fleur (an Erasmus student) made it a super wee base and I went to Portsoy to get it some flexible tubing. By Wednesday all was ready to return to copper smelting trials. The smelt balls tend to over heat in the shaft furnace as it’s hard to see what is going on.

So on Thursday I dug a pit furnace and trialed that smelting with great success.I got 35gm copper from 50gm ore in 30 minutes and using about 2kg of charcoal.

On Friday it was time to trial the bowls mentioned in the project title. This was using ore I’d smelted alloyed with 10% silver. The photo shows the open mould after casting. The copper did not complete the pour. I need to redesign the bowls with a thicker base. Even after heating the moulds and with sling casting, the copper would not stay molten in such a thin walled vessel.

Spending 4 weeks developing processes and tools has been brilliant and the work goes on.

Packing list NEOS 2

I’m trying out this copper/silver alloy bowl on a patinated mokume gane disc. I’ve tried other stands, but the bowl ‘stands’ well on its own, so I’m going for something simple that highlights the blue patina.

There will be some of my charm jewellery going to Art in the Buchat, Glenbuchat as well. I gave it a little polish and its tucked up in its boxes now waiting to charm visitors from Friday, 7th September.

 

Stone to Bowl

Finally the hand cranked forge blower has arrived. This is hopefully the last piece of the Stone to Bowl project. The forge blower will deliver air to the furnace, powered by hand rather than electricity. I’ll find out next month at SSW if it can be made to work. If the bellows can be hand powered it means that I can work anywhere,

This is the model we hope to replicate.

Clachtoll Broch: Scottish Sculpture Workshop

It looks like we should be able to bring an iron pour to Assynt as part of creating my final piece and involving local people. It’s still a long way to go, but it looks like iron will come to the Iron Age broch. The access to the broch site is a big consideration, as is the weather – molten metal and rain do not mix so we will need careful plans (and shelter). I would not use the actual broch site or anywhere that would adversely impact the site and will probably do a lot of prep work at the Sculpture Workshop.

I had a really useful meeting at SSW today with George Beasley, iron artist, and Eden Jolly, Senior technician, to scope out what I could do practically during my Clachtoll Broch artist residency. We could, for example, borrow SSW’s cupolette furnace, pictured, to cast iron in Assynt.

Once I’ve had a chance to meet and talk some more with the archaeologists who are working on the broch finds, I’ll be back up in Assynt to carry on working on the design, meeting people and seeking out resources

Thanks to Ross of RoRo studios for the photos.

Stone to Bowl

Following further research I have made up some clay balls with a mixture of malachite and charcoal inside to smelt. Copper results from removing oxygen from the copper ore, so the sealed clay balls should be more successful that the pit smelt that I did at the Sculpture Workshop.

I like the way the clay balls look a bit like poppy seed heads.

I’ll let them dry out a bit before I try and get them to smelting temperature in a charcoal furnace.

 

Stone to Bowl

I have been awarded funding for my Stone to Bowl project. It will pay for several weeks at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in 2018 to complete the project which will take copper ore through to cast pieces, using traditional and fully sustainable methods.

I’ve been doing some preparatory work:-

I experimented with melting the copper that I pit-smelted this year at the Sculpture Workshop, adding in some silver to lower the melting temperature. I melted 115gm and got 74gm of copper and some residual oxides which didn’t melt. The left hand metal is copper, the right is the original smelt material which is less pure. Next trial will be to sand cast with the copper/silver alloy.

 

 

 

Iron cups

The iron pour at the Sculpture Workshop went well. (Steve and I ran the furnace under the eagle eye of George Beasley and Eden Jolly) This is the iron piece that I showed the sand mould for in my last post. The found metal, probably copper, from the beach is now included in the iron.

This cup has a flat piece of beach copper in it:-

And this has some copper nails that featured in a post in January:-

The heat of the iron has melted the copper through to the outside of the cup.

 

Workshop coming in August