Press moulding and Collective Time Capsules.

Casting is often a mysterious process. Creating a mould, an imprint, a replica of something, and remaking it in a new material. There are so many moments the whole thing can go wrong. Leaky plaster. Air bubbles. Cracks. It’s offputting and difficult to get your head around. As a sculptural method, it’s often confined to specialist university teaching and facilities, not accessible beyond these limitations. 

But sometimes, it’s exactly the right thing to capture a moment. Trap something in time. As we’ve been rebuilding our toilet block, using as many bespoke artistic elements as we can, this seemed like the right opportunity to bring it to the collective. 

Press moulding is an immediate way of casting. Pushing objects into a clay bed, taking impressions. It doesn’t need precision, but thought about what is embedded and why. 

Recently, we’ve been thinking a lot about how objects contain stories. Things we make, use, touch and preserve. The house holds narratives in these items. 

As a group, we considered and collected as many objects as we could think of - paintbrushes, forks, the key for the front door, an easel, a bobbin, a carrabina, a wooden carving, a bolt, a handful of screws, leaves gathered from our outside space - and pressed them into a clay bed. We then cast this in plaster to make a mould, which will then be remade in jesmonite (which is an environmentally friendly alternative to concrete or resin). This object - made by many hands in one collective act - is a time capsule, preserving many moments which unfold in this building in a single surface. This is what casting can do, when it’s untethered from its limitations.

The jesmonite slab will be installed into a new countertop in our bathroom, where the objects we use and make in this house can tell our story.