| Wrapped up |

Our Year long Exploration in Working with Parian has recently concluded with a process exhibition at Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh . The project was gratefully funded by Inches Carr Trust supported by the Visual Arts Scotland Inches Carr mentoring Award Scheme.

Working closely with our selected mentor parian expert Myer Halliday we pushed boundaries of scalen and rose to many a challenge, some of which were successful and others became a long significant learning journey .

Based upon architectural roofing we created wooden blocks in locally milled Scottish Larch . The large block was selected , its form was cut with a view to when the final piece was cast for production this surface lamp would sit carefully balanced upon three of its nine faces enabling multiple light positioning .

The initial challenge arose when we made the first cast . Our vision was to create a flawless flat surface but the work had other ideas! the wooden master reacted with the heat of the plaster mould resulting in the opening up its grain, interesting in its right however for this piece we sought to work upon searching for an alternative solution to ensure a smooth finish.

Not only were we being challenged with surfaces we now had to work with scale. The bigger we cast the more concave the faces became, we had to scale up and cast up in stages . Each stage was a new mold all meticulously crafted by experienced mold maker Glen Clydsdale . Myers expertise was pushed and pushed as he added convex clay forms to the master so that when the slumping did occur it fell from convex to flat.

We then called in Scottish based Furniture maker Jonathan Pang to help us scale up our wooden master and explore alternative constuction options. We began with a CAD drawing , lovely in its own right

We now found ourselves commissioning Jonathan Pang to create a very large scaled up model in parian

The final cast was taken from the parian model , perfectly smooth and flawless on every face . Many firings saw the forms departure from the kiln take on various challenges but finally the mould & casting crew were able to achieve a finished form . Ready for exhibition but not batch production.

We are currently developing this piece for small batch production in Parian alongside experimenting with the same form in repurposed plastic sheeting and re used aluminium . Watch this space …