PPC Imaginarium 2017 Finalist — “In This Skin” cast cement head with gold leaf
I missed the entry deadline for the PPC Imaginarium awards every year. Mostly because I never found the time to really learn to work with cement or concrete. 2016 would be different. I had a beautiful wax-clay sculpture just begging for permanence. Surely I had already done the hard part.
It was a delightful and maddening process. I spent happy days, listening to audiobooks and singing along to music my voice was never built for, building the sculpture in wax clay (the wrong type of wax clay, but I would only learn that later) then going from blasé to panicked as I hunted for a mould maker and the first deadline drew in. When I finally found one I placed all my confidence, and the original sculpture, in his very confident hands. Then I deflated. There were endless delays, calls ignored and finally delivery of a huge, heavy, useless mould full of bubbles and distortions because he poured instead of brushing the silicone, then didn’t degas it and cut into my clay original so I couldn’t use that either. All this too late for the 2016 competition deadline.
But it was a whole year of learning, of trying natural latex, (and watching it dissolve because it was the wrong type of wax clay) and giving up. Then getting curious again, priming the whole sculpture in acrylic, and getting a successful rubber mould! Then discovering that the polyester shell-mould had warped ever so slightly so that nothing sealed. Giving up again. Finally, finally getting all the seams to hold together. On to casting, then learning what “flash setting” meant. Crying the ugly cry and finally, ecstatically, producing a viable cement sculpture! Realising the mould was probably good for only one more casting before I’d have to make another and crying again, but just a little bit this time. At last, adding gold leaf and feeling too delighted to remember all the agony of getting the damn thing to this point.
The delivery address that was sent to the artists was wrong and we stood outside a locked door together for about an hour while our panic slowly grew with the falling night. Cape Town is not the safest city at night. Nobody was answering the phone.
I tried the only other address that was connected with the competition, carrying a few kilograms of concrete to and from the car. A few weeks later the category finalists and public were sent the wrong addresses and dates for the exhibition opening too. There will probably be a moderate rant about this entire experience at some point.
The PPC Imaginarium sculpture competition was also how I learned the vital importance of buying insurance on any artwork that is travelling to multiple large exhibitions: The organisers dropped it during the Johannesburg Art Fair. Apparently off a plinth, according to their brief email. I had to ship a replacement in time for the next exhibition and thankfully I was already in the process of casting the next three in the edition of 24 concrete sculptures thanks to discovering the joy of silicone rubber instead of latex.
I sent the (fully insured) replacement and asked the competition organisers to send me back the original. Another lesson: make sure you know how the competition plans to treat and ship broken items. After much logistical wrangling and a helpful family member in Pretoria, I eventually got it back to Cape Town.
Remembering this competition still gives me a weird mix of frustration, joy and outright anger. The cement sculpture I entered had taken two years to cast, though the original clay master took only a few months. Now, after taking so very long to make, this piece is still in the sealed courier box, untouched with all the tape and labels unbroken, in what I find an amusing contrast to the contents. A few fellow artists and some collectors have suggested that I repair it using the Japanese method of Kintsugi. Given how many times the clay, the mould, the materials and all the things around it broke and were rescued, it seems a poetic way to finish.