I am starting an exciting adventure with a material I have not yet used before, called ‘cold porcelain’, or air dry polymer clay.
In the below video, you can see my journey with a hawthorn branch (one of my favourites!), the bread and butter of hedgerows and a common, English countryside feature. Not to mention they are one of the most magical of plants, deeply entrenched in fairy lore!
This is a complete labour of love and it does take a very long time, but I am very excited about the prospect of this new medium taking my work to another level. When I’m out and about, or even in the car, I am constantly hawking the hedgerows and verges for plants now and thinking to myself “can I cast you for a mold to replicate you to make you forever, unwitheringly beautiful?” and automatically I’m finding myself deconstructing the flora I see around me in such a way to put it back together again like a petal puzzle, I love it!
Since I started my taxidermy journey, I have struggled a lot with sourcing convincing artificial flowers and botanical elements to pair with my fauna, but they ended up degrading the piece because it just wasn’t up to standard. The preservation of real botanical elements has never been successful either because of their fragility and tendency to just dry and crumble and I want to make things that stand the test of time.
However, with the cold porcelain material, it is very delicate looking when processed thinly, but very durable at the same time, virtually unbreakable and is producing the results that I have dreamed about for so long, especially with my taxidermy work.
I hope you are as excited as I am for the next leg of my creative journey, it’s going to be magic!