Cascade at 908 Bel Air Road

When Carole Beadle came to the mill she brought a whole carton of clear acrylic packing tape to show me a new technique for making molds of awkward objects. The concept was simple: Pick an object you want to mold, wrap it with tape with the sticky side OUT then wrap it with the sticky side down against the first sticky layer, make the shell as thick as you want, then cut around the middle of the shell, removed the shell and tape it shut. 

        We tried making 4-foot eggs, but the tape shell would collapse. We gave up on the tape and moved to plexiglass for the Art Brut collaboration. But I kept using the technique to form the Killing Fields at the Galerie Sainte Catherine and even the very first Poet Boat. 

        Then, while putting together the Water Paper Stone: A Walkthrough Book for the San Francisco Center for the Book I used it again. I encased an 18-in bunch of sisal in tape, deliberately letting the sisal deform into an approximation of a rock. I used that same stem-rock to form the back wall of Water Paper Stone. I made a total of 105 rocks from the stem-rock which I taped together to form the large Floating Boulders at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. The original last chapter rocks, Cascade, hangs in the entry at 908 Belair Road.