I created 3 castings, each to represent certain aspects in this piece I like to call “Absolute Power”. The idea of the piece was to create two objects to represent space and time and a hand that would be able to handle them.
The first cast I made was a cast of my hand, but it was the second most problematic of all of them. I cast this one at my house and the initial process was fairly simple, but I ran into a big problem once I removed the alginate. Unfortunately, 3 of the fingers broke off, probably due to the plaster not setting completely, and despite multiple attempts to re-attach it, I wasn’t able to at my house. I then decided to re-attach it by using plaster and letting that set, which worked, fortunately, but ended up making my hand extremely messy looking.
The second cast I made, to represent time, was the “Time Turner” from Harry Potter. This was probably the most complicated of all the pieces I ended up casting. My original plan was to cast the entire time turner, including the edges, however, it would have been almost impossible to connect. Therefore, I decided to take apart the time turner and only cast the enter, at first, I tried casting it in alginate and then pouring clay inside, however, the alginate ended up going to the bottom of the time turner, making it nigh impossible to pour in plaster. Then, I decided to impress the center of the time turner on clay and then after that, I went ahead and directly cast it in plaster, which led to some clay being stuck on the edges, I cleaned it off as much as I could after letting it dry.
The final object I decided to cast was a quick piece, I chose to cast a golf ball, the process of making this was fairly simple, although, it could use a lot of refining. I wanted to cast an object that represented space, so originally, I tried casting very intricate statues of Hindu gods, I attempted to cast Vishnu & Shiva, but due to running into an excessive amount of complications when casting the two, I abandoned that for a more simplistic approach. I decided to cast a golf ball by submerging it in alginate and it worked, to a certain degree, unfortunately, my alginate got cracked around the middle and when I poured the plaster, it ended up leaking through some of the cracks. I ended up ultimately taking a knife and cutting off some of the extrusions on the piece and that made my asteroid, which I modeled off a golf ball.
Making these objects was fairly interesting as everything I could have done would have been fairly flexible due to choosing space and time as a subject matter, and for a while, it was, for example, I considered using a Hindu god to represent space, but it all came down to resources and practicality. Unfortunately, I feel like I wasted a lot of my alginate and plaster trying to make the time turner and the ball. Had I solidified my ideas for what I would cast for space, I wouldn’t have run into these problems. My process didn’t take too much change from my initial plan. I drew out what I wanted the structure to look like, then I cast my hand, then the time turner, and finally, the golf ball. The process helped me learn a lot about the capabilities and limitations of plaster. For example, I learned that I couldn’t risk making the objects too thin, therefore, I changed around my idea for “time”. Overall, this was quite an interesting project that required a lot of working around to succeed.
