Muhsroom farming

I'd like to show a little project i am working on for an installation we are making with our artgroup Hydra. The exhibition will take place in Sääksmäki at Voipaala art center in an old mansion( haunted of course). There will be a bunch of other artists besides us and it is going to be awesome.

This is just a little peek of what i am doing. You can follow Hydra on instagram @hydralahti for more and i will post more later.

So i have been making some mushrooms.

I started out by sculpting the mushrooms from plasteline, which is modeling clay that doesn't harden. It comes in different consistencies from soft to hard, this one is medium - which is still quite tough. I wasn't looking for too realistic look just enough to make resemblance and make a bunch of them.

After I was finished with the sculpting i made a test plaster mold of one. Had a margarin box where i dipped mushroom with help of a wire and held it until the plaster was set. After that i fixed the holes and lubricated the mold and the mushroom with baby oil in this case and poured in the top half. Then i took the mold apart and the shroom came out quite easily. I made a few test casts with silicone and which resulted in the trio below.

First one was just to see how the silicone casted, second was for see how it was with wire and transparent and third was to see how regular pigments would work with silicone.

heard in the workshop " It's so nice to do this stuff when you're no longer in art school and can just ignore the correct ways of doing things"

Next phase was to make more of them. This time the mushrooms would be more or less straight for ease of casting and wiring them. I stick them in edges of these metal vessels.

There were no wires on to help the dip here, which certainly could have helped. It got a little messy when trying to make the edges clean.

Sure enough i had a flash back from artschool(it was someone else then) after i had cast them and tried to bang them out of the box. I had used plain cooking oil on bottom and not like actual mold grease(cooking oil + bit of dish soap) and ended up breaking the bottom half of one. I didn't let the first part harden long enough after the second one and perhaps the oil mixed in with the plaster, and when it got stuck i dig around the edges and poured water in until it loosened up but it was very scrambly and broke apart.

I am painter by the way...

Luckily the other half was good and the mushrooms still intact, so i could recast the other - outside of the box this time just laying the plaster with my hands on top.

So after a bit of struggle i had few molds to make some mushrooms with. The pigment seemed to work well and i poured few sets of these over few days. The last ones weren't so tight as the first one and ended up wearing more over each cast, (i didn't seal them with shellac or anything) so more of the silicone leaked out towards the end.

Anyway i here is the crop so far waiting to be trimmed.

See you there, perhaps.