15 Seaweed

Seaweed 2005
Bronze h17 x w51 x d40 cm

Some seaweed lives in the roughest part of the ocean, clinging strongly to the rocks by a ‘holdfast’ in the area between the deep ocean and the rocky shore.  Despite being battered by the constant movement of the sea as it crashes onto the beach, seaweed provides, very like the forests of the land, a place of shelter and a source of food for many little creatures.

It is therefore quite devastating when, during a storm, the violence of the sea rips the holdfast from the rocks and flings the seaweed up onto the beach.  The result is the death of the seaweed and many of the creatures carried with it.

The rupture along the fault line between the Burmese and Indian plates on Boxing Day 2004, caused an enormous earthquake which then triggered tsunami waves up to thirty metres high.

It was the deadliest natural disaster in history, killing thousands of people in fourteen countries along the coastline of the Indian Ocean.  The horror of the images and the tragic, and also heroic, stories coming out during and after the event were why I wanted to produce Head: Seaweed.

It very nearly didn’t happen.  Not because I didn’t want to do it but because I encountered  a rather tricky problem.  I’d collected some clumps of seaweed from the beach at Bawdsey on the estuary of the Deben River, after some particularly stormy weather, and brought them back to Butley.  The seaweed was deposited into a large bucket of fresh water to keep it moist.  This was my material to burn out.  Now, all I had to do was make the head with the seaweed, over a central core, and cover it with the investment mould.  I did this twice, but each time the mixture of the investment mould wouldn’t set properly to its usual very hard, protective layer.  There was no way I could put this unfinished mound into the kiln as it would just fall to bits.

I asked Laurence for his help.  He had a think about it and came straight back with a great solution.  The seaweed was stopping the investment mould setting for some reason, and as I am not a scientific person, it wasn’t something I could resolve.  However, from a very practical point of view, it seemed to me that the moisture in the seaweed added to the water content in the investment mould’s mix of plaster and grog.  This made it difficult if not impossible for the mixture to set properly. Laurence’s way round was to quickly take an impression of the seaweed head with the normal investment mix just as it was starting to set, and then remove it.

So for the third time, I dressed a central core with the seaweed, then immediately covered this with a strong mix of the plaster and grog normally used for the investment mould.  As soon as this mixture had set enough to lift, I removed it and turned it over.  There, once the seaweed was gently pulled off, imprinted into the inner curved side, was the negative image of the seaweed head.  I was so thrilled to see it.  How clever, how simple the answer had been.  Now, I could paint this negative impression with liquid hot wax that would thereafter go through the normal bronze casting process.

The result was amazing, with all the seaweed detail there to see, along with some small shells I’d added (and this time the three holes were deliberate.)  A rather beautiful and unexpected spine of bronze (called feathering) had also been created, which followed the high point of the head.  Normally at the metal working stage this would be cut off, but I made the decision to leave it on.