Saturday, March 26, 2011

Architectural Details - Sculpture comes in many forms

The road to creating sculpture has taken me down different paths from time to time.  A collector of work in California is in the process of building their dream home, based Cooleemee plantation house in North Carolina.  I worked under the guidance of Ed Watkins of Andrew Skurman Architects, to achieve the look of the original architectural trim positioned above 12 doors within Coolemee.
With the architectural plans specifying varying dimensions, I worked to create a segment of the 'wave' detail in a way that keeps the artistic part of the wave detail intact. The seam, which would later be transparent, is placed at a point where the artistic detail of the wave is not touched when it is cast in plaster and joined together with more segments that makeup the length of architectural trim.

After I created the wave design in clay, based on photographs of the original work from Cooleemee, the clay piece was taken to Deuxpan Art Company where it was scanned using a 3D scanner.  Once scanned, the image was flipped horizontally, creating a 3D image of the wave in reverse direction.  The image was printed in 3D, giving me a positive to make a mold from.  I created corner pieces and  made molds in silicon rubber of the wave detail for both directions and the corner pieces.  The molds were shipped to California, cast in plaster and joined together to meet the door length requirements.
This was certainly a diversion from creating horse sculptures in bronze, but an interesting project nevertheless.