After recreating the missing arm and garland for a broken historic statue for the Biltmore Estate, I was then commissioned to reproduce entirely two other historical ceramic statues. The first, Woman Reading a Book, followed by Woman Holding Basket. Not much was known about the statues’ origins or who they were supposed to be, hence the somewhat vague titles. The original statues had been outside for about 100 years and were very deteriorated.
As it turned out, this project was one of the most technically challenging yet, requiring creative solutions for all sorts of problems like scaling, molding, and firing the work.
Because clay shrinks, I needed to make a replica 9% larger than the original that would eventually shrink to the correct size. To achieve the scaling, I made two wooden “scaling boxes” surrounding the original and the replica statues. One box was marked with measurements 9% larger than the other scaling box. I also had custom proportional calipers made to help with scaling. Using the boxes I could map corresponding X, Y, Z coordinates to scale. It was a bit tedious, but it worked.
The mold for the Woman Reading a Book took months to make. Although I have made hundreds of molds over my career I still had a lot of room to grow and discover new ways of doing it. I adapted methods of shotcrete construction from my experience building skateparks to create these state molds: metal reinforcement, spraying the plaster instead of pouring, and a retardant to buy some time with plaster application.
The mold sections bolt together and allowed me to slowly construct the mold on the kiln floor, press-molding wads of clay and hand-building internal structure as I went. Leaving upper sections of the mold off in the beginning allowed access to apply the clay by hand to the inside of of mold below. Sections were bolted on as needed. Eventually, once clay had been packed into the last section, all of the mold parts were removed and then the entire surface of the sculpture was sculpted again to remove mold seams and imbue a uniqueness to the cast.
Firing such a large sculpture was also no simple matter. Skutt Kilns made me their first ever transformer oval kiln. Even loading the kiln rings around the sculpture proved to be yet another problem to solve, eventually employing a gantry crane to assist with moving kiln rings.
After 23 months, the first statue commission was complete.
Then I began working on the next statue, Woman holding a basket…
