Colin Mitchell Artwork

Plaster

I occasionally make these pieces when friends get married. Unfortunately they are very heavy, so out of town friends usually lose out.

"Felesegem" is Hungarian for "My Wife"... well technically "Felesegem" means "My Half Ass" because I haven't switched my keyboard to display accents used over certain letters, which are not used in the English alphabet. This duality provides me with endless amusement.

These were in a group show with my co-workers called "Communications".

Also in the group show.

I give the prefix "Accidental" to some works when they aren't planned, but come about due to the offcuts from other planned works.

The title for this piece is a pun, as it's an image of an Iron Cross, but it's also literally an Iron Cross. Kind of the opposite of Magritte's "C'ici n'est pas un pipe".

I liked the grouping together of these small pieces into a larger work. One of the pieces was the earth as a cartoon-style hand bomb with a fuse sticking out the top, which partially inspired the title along with the layout looking like what the big bang may have looked like immediately upon explosion. The layout can be variable.

I made this piece in the tiny living room of our basement rental suite for a brief show in a building slated for demolition. First I created a metal skeleton, then built a mold around the skeleton and poured plaster into it. After leaving it to dry for a few days I carved out the figure, then built back onto it because it was lacking energy. Eventually it ended up in the garden of my parent's home for years before being broken into pieces and buried (again due to a lack of storage facilities). I really enjoyed watching it change over the years, and the changing environment in the photos.

This is a photo from the Hillside Building show. Having the painting "Mellow Yellow" in behind the sculpture "Sitting Figure", I decided to give the whole a new title - "Tranquility Bass".

The first Wedding Piece. This one's my Brother's.

The largest plaster piece I made. Each side of the cube weighed about 125 lbs. Unfortunately, due to this weight, I had to destroy the piece because I had no way to store it long-term. Such a painful experience.

This was the first of my plaster pieces. It began as a simple test of the technique and grew into an exploration of the possibilities and study of the limits of the process.

This is an individual panel (so to speak) from the work "Test Pattern". Initially I wanted to keep "Test Pattern" as a single work (turning down a sale to Janet Cardiff and George Bures-Miller in the process), but later changed my mind.

Another individual piece from "Test Pattern"

©2016 onward, Colin Mitchell / colinmitchellartwork.com