Priley Riley, Update on The Child Sculpture, September 2015

The Child Sculpture was sadly recently vandalised. The book was found cracked around the hands, suggesting someone had tried to get the book out of them. I have therefore spent the last couple of weeks fixing this. I finished work on it today, so The Child Sculpture will be back outside Carillon Court Shopping Centre once the lacquer sealing the paint has properly dried. As the photo shows, the book is much thicker (and stronger) now. Over the last couple of months I have also been working on my dissertation for the next academic year. It is currently 5000 words long and is based on artist self-publishing, as I am interested in self-publishing a book revealing how The Child Sculpture was made.

Priley Riley, The Child Sculpture, January- July 2015

Shortly after my last post I applied for a commission from Charnwood Borough Council and Quadron to make a public sculpture. This sculpture would celebrate Ladybird Books, which were founded in Loughborough 100 years ago! This commission, sponsored by Serco, was an opportunity available to one Fine Art student at Loughborough University and I was delighted that my proposal was successful in gaining this commission.

My proposed idea was to create a life-size sculpture of a 4 year old child reading a book. I started making the sculpture in January, when I first used a couple of photos of my fiancé aged 4 to study the proportions of a 4 year old. I then constructed an armature (which is like a wire skeleton) and this supported the weight of the child that I then modelled around the armature using clay. Once I was happy with the clay child, I began the casting process, which was a long and quite complex process! I cast the clay child in plaster, making a multi-part plaster waste mould. I then used the plaster moulds to cast resin into and pieced all of the sections back together, resulting in the resin child. Car body filler was then used to make surface corrections before the sculpture was sprayed with primer, allowing me to then paint the sculpture. I used acrylic paint for this and sealed the paint with clear lacquer.

On the 15th of July 2015 the work, which I called ‘The Child Sculpture’, was then set up outside Loughborough’s Carillon Court Shopping Centre- this is the same site where the first Ladybird Books were printed and published. The following day the sculpture was judged as part of Loughborough’s entry in Britain in Bloom. Since this The Child Sculpture has been in 5 different newspapers (the Loughborough Echo, Leicester Mercury, Crawley News, West Sussex County Times and the Crawley and Horley Observer), on different websites, and I was interviewed by BBC Radio Leicester, which was on the radio on the 28th of July 2015. The Child Sculpture is also expected to be in this month’s Loughborough Community Eye magazine.

It is incredible to see the reactions of the public towards The Child Sculpture, so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Serco, Charnwood Borough Council, Quadron, Loughborough University, and Peter Beacham- one of the technical tutors at the university- for the opportunity and support.

The photos above show the sculpture when it was in clay, the completed sculpture, and me beside The Child Sculpture.

Priley Riley, An update on my work, November 2014

In the last couple of weeks I have visited a number of different galleries in Leicestershire, England, including Embrace Arts, New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Silver Arcade, 2 Queens Gallery, LCB Depot’s The New Incunable Print Shop, LCB Depot’s print show P2P 2014, Phoenix Cinema and Art Centre and PACE at De Montfort University. My favourite of the gallery visits was LCB Depot’s The New Incunable Print Shop, where I did a quick drawing of my hand which was 3D printed in front of me! I applied printing ink over the surface of the 3D printed hand and printed it onto paper. The 3D print will be used by The New Incunable Print Shop in posters. Photos of the original drawing, the drawing being 3D printed, the final 3D print, and the ink print that I did are shown above. I have also been working on my project on the heart by casting a red heart in resin using a vinyl/ rubber mould that I made a few weeks ago. Photos of the front and back of the resin heart are shown below. I have also started to make my own concertina style book, which I will upload photos of once completed.

Priley Riley, Face casting, October- November 2014

I had my face cast for the first time last Friday. In preparation for it, I covered my face in baby oil and put my hair into a cap out of the way. My tutor then started applying alginate to my face, shown in the first two photos. Once the alginate had set, a layer of plaster was applied over the alginate to make it stronger (see the 3^rd photo). Once the plaster had set, I was able to pull the alginate and plaster layers off in one go. As you may be able to see from the 4^th photo, however, the alginate cast you take off curves inwards instead of outwards, so I continued to work on it on Friday by applying plaster to the inside of the alginate cast. Today, as the plaster that I had laid inside had set, I was able to carefully separate the final plaster cast, shown in the final 3 photos, from the alginate one.

Priley Riley, Developed cast and storage desk, 24th- 26th October 2014

Last Friday I made a plaster cast of my hand holding the plaster heart that I made the previous week (so the two works are now joined together, which I think makes the heart cast look much better). Photos of the developed cast are shown above, from different angles. I then spent my weekend working in a team with 3 other students to build a storage desk which will be used by Loughborough University. The workshop was lead by artist Maria Pask and craftsman Peter Leadbeater, although we constructed it with minimal help, using an idea I had from a book, and from planks of old pieces of found wood. We then finished by carving our names into the desk. I've included a few photos of the event and final storage desk below- I’m in the black trousers with red stripes.

Priley Riley, An update on my work on the heart, October 2014

A quick summary of my work over the past few weeks!; I have made 3 A3 size canvases to use for more portrait paintings, modelled a life-size clay heart that I intend on having fired in a kiln (see the top photo), made a plaster cast of a heart using a real lamb’s heart (the 2^nd photo shows a stage of me making it, the 3^rd shows the final outcome), made a vinyl/ rubber mould from the plaster cast (the 4^th photo shows a stage of me making it, the 5^th and 6^th show the two halves that make up the final mould), and have used the rubber mould to cast 2 hearts in wax (the ^7th photo shows the front of one of the wax hearts, the ^8th shows the back of the same piece). I have also made a cardboard cut-out of the heart and the word heart combined (see the 9^th photo) as well as a few quick pieces in plaster (such as the piece in the final photo, where I carved a drawing of a heart into plaster).  I have been researching the heart using British Heart Foundation resources and am developing science based ideas for my art work as a result of this research. I have also been working on written assignments for my course.

Priley Riley, Acrylic self portrait 2, September 2014

This acrylic self portrait was painted onto A4 acrylic paper. I am happy with the resemblance, although I intend on painting onto a larger surface in future so that I can get more detail into a single area- for example, the hair would appear finer if I were to use the same very thin paintbrush for a much larger painting.