Bronze Fungi

The first series of work I have made for my current project are three individual bronze Fungi, they are individual pieces, however they they exhibit together as a three.

These are technically my first fully finished bronze sculptures, done entirely myself which I am extremely proud of and happy with the result

I wanted to do them as a starting point of exploring fungi. I wanted to make the most quirky and non stereotypical fungi I could find that weren't immediately recognizable as fungus. I chose Shield Lichen ( but made it vary from its natural look), birds nest fungus and clathrus ruber fungus. I really enjoyed the obscure and unsuspecting make up of these species and wanted to recreate them in my own interpretation.

Due to the longevity of the bronze casting process these pieces took a while from start to finish, but I truly enjoyed each step of the process and doing a bronze for myself for once. I decided to sculpt directly into the wax. I loved this as I enjoy sculpting in wax, however this is also risky because if the bronze pour goes wrong in any way or even they break before then I cannot remake them exactly the same. This has meant taking extra steps in looking after them in the process to avoid any mishaps. I put each piece on it's own tree for this purpose and had to be really careful when shelling, trying to get the liquid into all the little crevices, this proved more challenging than I expected. Challenging to the point that once they were cast it didn't work out so well so there were metal air bubbles in the crevices. However, They did all survive the casting process really nicely and I was really happy with the outcome. Even the air bubbles grew on me and I decided to keep them on rather them laboriously dig them out with the dremel, which could have severely damaged the surface detail.

While making these initially in the wax I wanted to have mycelium roots coming out the bases that hold them off the ground. I started sculpting this in wax but very quickly found I wasn't happy with the look and getting the wax to set to hold it up was extremely challenging, especially as I needed them to be really thin, they simply wouldn't have had the strength. I decided it would work much better if I were to weld on bronze wire after they were cast. However, once they were cast I felt even this probably wouldn't work as they were even heavier than I expected and the wire definitely wouldn't have held them up. I also felt with the aesthetic they had at this point they looked better without. Maybe in display I could just have wire protruding from the back to symbolize this. I thought I could do this by having them on the wall rather than attempting to have the roots hold them up from the ground.

When it came to patination, I was really excited for this as I haven't done it before. I chose colours, white, green and orangy- brown. to achieve this the chemicals I used were copper sulfate (green), ferric nitrate (orangy-brown), and gesso nitrate (white). I wanted them to work together as a grouping so the colours had to compliment each other. So I used the ferric as the baseline colour for all of them then accented it with copper and gesso to make the various details stand out.

I'm really happy with how these pieces have turned out. At the moment I'm not entirely sure where I want to take the project next. I am asking myself questions such as: what is the relationship between these pieces and my concept of communication? Do they have anything to say in regards to communication with nature? I feel I have a lot of development to do with the work and where I want to take it but this was my starting point.