Mike Leckie Sculpture A New Glass Piece


A Glass Work in Progress

As the weather begins to warm up, and Mike eagerly anticipates an intense period of carving stone outdoors, he is working in his studio on molds for some new glass pieces. The creative process is constantly evolving and nothing is set in stone, even for a sculptor.


		MAY 7th - 2007 Q: What are you working on? Mike: These are bas-reliefs with an added base to make them free-standing icons. They're going to be cast in glass in my own studio. These are the biggest glass pieces I've ever attempted in my studio.

		Q: Did you have models for the faces? Mike: Nope. Made them up.

		These are narrative sculpture pieces. My titles serve as a springboard but viewers will make up their own stories, led into the pieces by the faces, the colors and the translucent nature of glass.

		Q: What will the colors be? Mike: I have the whole rainbow of colors here in the studio, but I'm not going to give that away yet. (chuckles)



		MAY 21 Q: Why is cleaning the mold important? Mike: I use water based clay. Any powder from the clay is an enemy of the wax because it will stay as a residue on the inside of the mold when the wax melts out. Any little piece of dirt in the mold comes out as a negative pit in the glass.

		Q: What kind of wax do you use? Mike: It's called pattern wax and I buy it from a foundery supply house. It is a little more like plastic than wax people are familiar with because this one doesn't shrink as much as the other waxes.

		Q: Why is that important? Mike: You want to be able to hold all the detail and all the edges of the piece you've just created. If you lose them they won't end up in the final piece. What you want to end up with is an exact replica. You want the wax to have as crisp edges and as good a surface as you want in the final piece.

		Q: Is there a trick to pouring wax into the mold? Mike: Yes (chuckling) there are several tricks. There are people who make a complete career out of pouring wax. Wax should be at appropriate temperature. You have to have your mold warm. If you…pour, stop….pour, stop…pour, stop you get a bunch of lines called chill lines that look like lines in a piece of wood. You want your wax to have no bubbles when you pour and you want to pour slowly and carefully. If you get a little wild and splash wax you get bubbles and the bubbles will all show up in the surface of your piece. You don't want that. I pour in a small amount and then roll it around on the inside of the mold and get a real good surface coat. Some people fill up the mold. There's less possibility of spilling a lot of wax the way I do it.

		Q: What was it like taking the rubber off and seeing what was behind it? Mike: It's a quiet thrill because I get to look at the standing art for the first time because it's been laying down and I don't get to see it standing up until that moment. That's a thrill, but the quiet part is that I'm very aware that there is a lot of process left to go. There are still six more processes left to go before we end up with glass.

		The reason we make the wax model is that this is the lost wax casting process. Lost wax is very old. It's called lost because the wax leaves the mold and leaves a perfect impression that then is filled with metal or glass. It's a very ancient technique, mostly used in metal, making a plaster mold around wax, melting it out and pouring metal in the hot mold.. An old technique of making a plaster mold around wax, melting it out and putting wax in there. We're talking thousands of years. I do it that way because the detail that you can attain from the wax model that's copied by the plaster mold is very tight…extreme detail. This very same thing is being done to cast gold jewelry around African campfires using beeswax and mud.

		May 27 The wax model is in the plywood box behind my head. Those sides are put together with wax to hold them together. The wax is a good medium. It's so easy to use when its liquid and it dries hard. It's also temporary, it can be broken up easily. I'm putting plaster in one of 7 buckets that I'm mixing for the mold….the mold was that big. By the time we were lifting the mold we figured it was between 120 and 140 pounds.

		It's a very specific mixture of plaster, silica flour, water and chopped fiberglass cloth…a closely guarded formula, of course…actually you can find it in a book. Lots of extra fiberglass fiber for reinforcement. The fiberglass cloth is also. All of those buckets need to be made very carefully at approximately the same time so that when the mixture goes from liquid to solid….it all happens at the same time or it doesn't work because some of the plaster has gone off and some of it hasn't…from liquid to hard…it's a chemical reaction.

		What I'm doing here is painting water on the wax mold because the capillary action of the water will pull the plaster mix into the detail. I'm painting all the detail of the piece.

		This is the pouring process. I have the bucket up really high held with one hand and I'm pouring into my hand because if you pour into your hand, it goes back to the wall of the piece and you get a lot less bubbles. Bubbles are the bane of a caster because the bubble will end up being a positive on the piece. If it's a negative in the plaster, it will be a positive in the piece.

		The fiberglass is also silicaI'm wearing the mask because almost everything in the mix except for the plaster and the water will kill me if I breathe it. The silicon flower is 300 mesh silica which is silica powder. If you breathe it your lungs are not able to expel it. It actually forms scar tissue around every particle of silica and so your lungs end up being all scar tissue instead of air sac.

		I'm pouring up to depth. You can still see the base and the nose and the mouth on one of the faces. We will go two and a half to three inches over that base to get the proper depth for the mold.

		I am placing the fiberglass cloth, which you can see on the surface. I let it get damp and then I take them piece by piece and put them at all of the stress points in the mold. They go around the outside edges, across the flat surfaces. You can't have them touching the wax piece, they have to be suspended in the plaster. It strengthens the mold. I fire higher than the temperature that is good for the plaster so you have to do everything you can to help the plaster.

		It's not difficult to get the plaster off of my arms. You just dip them in water and it comes off.

		May 28th Taking it out of the steamer. See all that wax underneath? That's what's left from a lot of wax molds.


		June 4 I'm going to fill this lower section in here with glass as heavy as I can but that won't stop some of these upper ones from rolling in there just a touch but that's ok. That's one of those looks I don't mind having. The black will probably stay where it is. It's called stiff black. These other ones will flow just a little bit but so far everything is down in grooves. I'll fill the faces, too. Then I'm going to take some larger blocks of just plain color and sit them on top. These are the background colors. Smokey green and smokey blue. They're light colors because it'll still look like translucent glass with just a minor tint to it. It won't be white glass.

		It's kinda fun to be able to smash up glass with a hammer. This is all Bullseye glass. It's always compatible. The expandable rate of all their the glass is the same.

		There is question about how much the glass is going to move and if you can put another piece in someplace. The more glass you get in, the more intense the color, but you put too much in and it's going to overflow its little spot. I have a pretty good idea how much.

		I want these things to settle into the holes. The holes will be the positive. I might actually put some more of the same color in on top of them before I put the background color on. If I put the background color on now it will probably roll down into the holes and create a little mix of color. I try to separate them a little more than that. Keeping them separate is a little harder to do.

		June 8 The finished piece still in its mold.

		June 27 All there is to do is put the fine touches on the piece with file and sandpaper.

		I like the finished product.

		July 1 This is very very close to what I hoped I was going to be able to get. I planned for the pink and the gray to go together with the purple and blue. I planned for the turquoise face and for the blue frame inside the black frame. The black frame was one of the first things I did to the piece.

On a scale of 1-10, the degree of difficulty is about 12. This is almost two feet wide and 18 inches tall with life-size faces. The degree of difficulty in casting it and having it stay in one piece in the firing? It's a big deal.

mike.leckie@gmail.com

copyright 2008 Mike Leckie