Pouring it out

It has been a while since my last post, apologies! I was actually on a trip to Berlin over the last weekend, and purposely did not bring my laptop. So this post will be about what I did last week, before the weekend!

I tried casting slib (gietklei in dutch), which is a type of liquid, dissolved, clay that is mostly used to fill molds to make hollow casts. The slib has the texture of.. well.. slib.. like thin mud with small grains of sand in it. It made my hands very dry when I tried to stir the contents of the bucket to a homogeneous mixture. 

I get the feeling that everything here has that effect, which reminded me of the lab that I work at, where the hand sanitizer has the same dehydrating effect. Maybe I should start to bring my moisturizing cream here as well. 

So after stirring ferociously, I could pour the mixture into the 10 orb-shaped moulds that I wanted to use, and then had to wait 40 minutes to let it dry. Appearantly in this time the gypsum (Gips) mould will absorb some of the water that is in the slib, and cause it to be more clay-like. This process slowly works its way to the center of the mold, until you have a solid cast. However I would not let it come that far, but would pour out the slib that was still liquid, creating a bowl instead of a solid half-sphere.

While waiting for the casts to dry, I tried something different, I used the casting slib to pour figures on the gypsum plate in the workplace. This plate had the same drying effects on the slib as the molds, but allowed me to create free two-dimensional shapes. I used this property and the poured effect to create cell-like shapes, which I then let dry before scraping them off with a thin metal plate. 

while letting my pours dry, I returned to my molds, which had rested for 40 minutes now. I poured the liquid part of the slib back into the original bucket, and let the formed bowls dry a little more in their molds. 

It was then time for another small experiment, where colour pigments were mixed in with the slib to create colored paint that I could again pour in the gypsum plate. the results were surprising and a little freaky.

When waiting for these to dry, I could take the bowls out of their molds and mount them together, using a crooked fork and some water. First I would scrape the bowls with the fork, where they would touch each other, and then add water and press them together. This way the clay of the two bowls would merge, so to say, and the bowls would stay together. 

After this I could patiently scrape the last pourings off the cast plate and place them on an oven plate, so the fragile shapes would not have to be moved again before baking.