I've had this idea for as long as I've worked with foam fabrication and life casting figures. The scale of molding that can be created through this process is incredible. The mitering that would be maddeningly complex and prohibitively expensive in other materials is easily achievable by this method. This is just the first presentation. A test flight so to speak.
The photos in this are all taken from the internet just to give me reference to build around. What I really want to see are figures climbing in and out of the frames, achieving a dynamic parallax, a play on the ancient tradition of trompe l'oeil, as well as offering a means of getting sculpture off of the floor. I'd like to miter and bend these great profiles around groups of figures held to the wall, painted and textured and dancing within in their architectural context. Life size figures achieve monumentality when these massive moldings bend to their will rather that the other way around. Even in the enlarged figure, a figure nearly sixteen feet tall if whole, is in her frame only eight feet and is still able to share the wall with two other large pieces.
In order to achieve the figure groups of which I speak, I will next turn to poser. It's a digital figure posing program that will help me weave figures around one another while existing both inside and outside of the frame. Once assembled they will be moved in to Zbrush so that they may be re-sculpted, textured and painted. It is my guess that by the time I figure out all of this, I'll be ready to learn a program with more sophisticated rendering abilities than Sketchup. It is my hope to achieve beautifully lit and richly textured animations. For pieces that demand as much wall space as fairly large paintings do, the ability to plan pieces in their virtual exhibit spaces is a huge advantage and quick insight as to what does and doesn't work before production ever begins.
The first pieces in this cycle will involve life castings of figures staged with in frames that are designed and constructed specifically for a predetermined pose. No two should ever be the same. There should be a gentle intimacy that molding of this weight has never known before. As figures span the inner holds of their yielding frames, a parallel is drawn between them and how the Hellenistic order of columns seem to bulge under the weight of their entablatures.
Ultimately, it is my goal to learn how to sculpt and design objects entirely in the computer. This will afford me limitless availability of models, posing scenarios and mixed scales. Mixing scales and letting figures move through one another is going to be pretty interesting and well beyond anything that life casting could afford.
The above described designs would then be uploaded to a carving robot and milled out of a low density, clay coated foam then, detailed and finished by hand prior to molding.
