Translucency doesn’t photograph brilliantly, so let me talk you through this.  The hands and feet are cast in clear water resin, and left to right some objects set inside them as follows: an eye in a hand, a marble in a foot, a pinned moth in a hand, an eye in a foot, and a hand holding a tooth.  As ever, the words are from Aurthur Mee.

I have a stash of new materials on my desk I am yet to use – some watch faces, more dolls eyes and some magpie feathers.  They are calling to me as we speak, but I need to do some sensible things this week, like marking and finishing writing  a review for Poetry Salzburg Review. I head off to the lovely Ledbury Poetry Festival on Friday -I have a reading on Sunday morning, so I may not get to play with the new materials till after then.  I’ve just had to order a new trampoline, but that’s another story entirely.

Goodness – it’s been weeks since I’ve posted something new here!  Terrifying how Time’s winged chariot zips along.  And it’s actually been a few weeks since I’ve made anything new, so here is one I made earlier.  Martin had only just had the chance to photograph it.  As you will see, I’ve branched out considerably from my trusty square canvases.  These rectangles allow a sense of narrative.  I have no idea what the narrative is here –  the marbles would probably have something to say about it.  The hands and feet too, perhaps.

The hands and feet here are cast from fairly light plaster.  They are porous, and you probably can’t see from this image, they have a few air bubbles.  This made me cross at first – I wanted them perfect  – but now I rather like the fragile quality it gives them.  The marbles are antique and have their own bubbles and a few knocks from different stages in their lives.

Hmmm…I am not sure about the scruffiness of the underside of this canvas, now I look at it here.  It doesn’t look as bad in the flesh.  My main regret here, is that I didn’t make a latex mould of this sleeping face before I stuck it into this box. I am as ever, on the look out for materials, and especially a dreaming face like this one, but there seem to be less and less dolls about. Perhaps they are hiding from me or have dreamed themselves into a world where I cannot get my scalpel on them.

In the history of me sticking things to other things, this has been the trickiest.  It made me invest in silicone glue, since which I haven’t looked back.  I am not saying this piece will help you study the weather, but anything’s worth a shot, no?

The house smells constantly of curing resin or drying latex, or must do.  I have grown blind to it, if you can have blind smelling.  You can have blind tastings, can’t you.  Anyway, no matter.  The reproduction of hands and feet isn’t moving fast enough, so I’m making more moulds.  I have been setting moths and marbles and eyes inside the hands and feet, to make them look a bit like objects held in amber.  I have discovered that resin doesn’t dry, it ‘cures’ and needs heat for this, so have introduced a hairdryer into the studio to help with the sticky resin problem. So fingers crossed for that.

I’ve invested in some 12×5 canvasses and am working on some landscape hand and foot pieces, which I will ask Martin to photograph as soon as he gets a mo.  I am still deciding whether to add any kind of Arthur Mee caption to the piece below.  It is a bit of an anomaly in this respect, but I think it would mess up the composition.  Hmmm….more vintage marbles winging their way to me from ebayland.  If marbles can wing.  Yes, let’s make them wing.

Well, my resin castings haven’t gone off yet, they are still quite tacky.  A sculptor friend of mine told me that the resin might have past its sell by date, which may be why it isn’t playing ball. Growl.  So,  I doubled the accelerator, which sped up the transmigration from liquid to solid, and gave off lots and lots of heat, but you can still leave your fingerprints on the limbs like translucent bruising. Sigh.

So, here is a plaster casting of a baby doll hand instead.  Butterfly courtesy of ebay, words courtesy of the splendiferous Aurthur Mee.  I poured plaster into the canvas so in real life, the hand appears to grow from it.  That’s what I think anyway.