The Gibran Sculpture Series
Yesterday I went to the workshops where we have made a new steel armature. It’s for a 2.2 metre fine art bronze sculpture of a work I have named:
“SPEAK to us of FREEDOM”.
,An armature is the mechanism, the ‘internal scaffolding’, used to support the clay as we begin to build the sculpture.
This work echoes words from a poem of the same name by Kahlil Gibran from his famous book, The Prophet. The book has sold millions of copies world-wide. As a result, Gibran is the third most published poet of all time, with Shakespeare being the first.
Our next stage is to make the clay model. We’ll do this by scaling up from my original smaller work using a pantograph tool.
Working by hand puts life and soul into a finished work, which a computerised 3D enlargement never does.
How enlargement works
I’ve put a larger version of the photo below and on the small bench you can see the original bronze from which we are scaling up. The ordered jumble of vertical steel rods is the armature and that’s where the clay is going to go. That’s the next stage. Richard Clarke, the enlarger, who is really talented at this stuff, is standing behind holding the pantograph tool. It is a sort of mechanical magnifier, used to accurately replicate every tiny detail of the original onto the new enlarged clay.
Click on the photo for a video about the process.
See more about the finished Speak to us of Freedom sculpture here.