Bob Hawke study in dusty corner of my studio.
Out of the Furnace
Here is the Julia Gillard bust making its next step towards the Ballarat Prime Ministers Avenue. It’s just been hoisted out of the furnace in the centuries old traditional “lost wax” method of casting. It’s still covered in “grog”, a mixture of plaster and sand, and some of this has been knocked off by master founder Bill Perrin, to see if the cast is a good one. The wax figure inside was melted out of the grog coating and replaced with molten bronze, which has now cooled, hopefully without much shrinkage or leakage. You can see the yellowish bronze peaking through, and a rough image of the face emerging. There are nails sticking out of the bronze, which are put there to hold the inner and outer parts of the cast in their correct alignment, and there are bronze protrusions sticking off parts of the head where wax runners were placed to make sure the molten bronze poured cleanly. The next painstaking stage is the chasing, in which the runners are ground off and any imperfections are annealed or chiselled by the highly skilled chaser with his tiny set of handmade tempered steel tools.
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2012-05-26 Julia Gillard mystery image from mould photo
The finished mould of the Julia Gillard portrait bust for Ballarat Prime Ministers Avenue. I took this snap on my mobile of the mould propped upside down in the sunlight on the floor of the foundry. The light falls on the bottom of the negative image of the face inside the mould, and produces this strange effect. So far the only people who have seen the actual head, in the form of a plaster cast from this mould, are the Ballarat Council, who have approved it. A wax copy will be made from this mould and this wax will be encased entirely in plaster and grog and put in the kiln. The wax will melt out and the bronze can be poured in. This is called the lost wax process and has been around since the Chinese invented it centuries before Christ …. or was it someone in the mediteranean.
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