Working with volumes

Strictly speaking, a sculptor is who sculpts or carves, that is, one who takes away what remains from the material – wood, marble, or ivory – to extract a figure from it.  But it is also a sculptor who uses the additive method of clay modeling and uses casting and metal smelting to create his or her pieces of bronze, gold, or aluminum. Not to mention the artist who creates “ephemeral” art – figures of short duration in time – with sand from the beach, ice or baking chocolate.

Being curious and creative, Man has always felt the need to make reproductions of what he sees and what he imagines. Thus, he has created images of gods, men, and animals, either for religious and ceremonial purposes or to praise heroes and leaders or commemorate battles. The final reason is to satisfy his appetite for beauty and express it through sculptures and decorative objects.

The materials, tools, and techniques to make a sculpture are varied. The classic method consists of sculpting more or less demanding materials such as stones (limestone, marble, alabaster) or wood, using sharp or pointed objects. Another way of making sculptures is modeling in clay or wax (remember the figures, disturbing for their realism, from Madame Tussaud’s wax museum). If the material is a metal, such as bronze, the complicated casting process is used,  which requires specialized techniques and workers. One of the procedures consists of preparing a wood or clay model from the original, made of plaster or silicone. The original piece is removed, and its entire interior is covered with hot wax. When it cools down, the sculpture’s replica is left “in the negative,” and filled with a ceramic material to achieve rigidity. A drinking tube is attached to it, through which the molten bronze pours at 1140 degrees centigrade, and will occupy the space left by the wax when it melts. The wax escapes through some tubes or chimneys placed for that purpose. It is the traditional method of the lost wax.

Although the artist did not use this complex process, we can imagine what it must have been to build in parts what is perhaps the best-known sculpture in the Western world: the Statue of Liberty. It was conceived by the young sculptor Frederic Bartholdi to be offered as a gift from France to the United States in commemoration of its one hundred years as a nation (1876). Its outer part or “skin” is made of hammered copper sheets. In iron, the interior structure was designed by Auguste Eiffel, who had not yet built his famous Parisian tower. The statue had to be dismantled into 350 parts to be transported, cross the Atlantic and then reassemble it: a real puzzle.

From the 20th century onwards, the sculpture has adopted a wide variety of new materials and different procedures: welding for iron sheets, molds for resin or the so-called artistic assembly using fragments of the same material, as well as everyday objects that are entirely alien to aesthetics, including garbage or waste materials.