{"id":1282,"date":"2018-07-03T12:47:15","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/?p=1282"},"modified":"2018-07-03T15:21:06","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T14:21:06","slug":"bronze-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/03\/bronze-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Bronze Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve recently been hunting around for an artist to help with a project we’re putting together here in Auch.<\/p>\n

Thankfully\u00a0 I found one – Laure BELLION , and while we were discussing the project, she mentionned the fact that she was involved with another project in Auch which was all about a couple of artists from Burkina Fasso<\/strong> and making bronze sculptures.<\/p>\n

This sounded interesting from a photographic point of view, so last Saturday I visited the Atelier des Berges du Gers<\/strong> (Gers Riverbank Workshop<\/em>) and this is what I saw:<\/p>\n

The previous week, various budding artists following the course, had made wax sculptures which they had then covered in clay. This week, Ibrahim<\/strong> and his father Bamadou<\/strong> made a fire in an old oil drum and heated up the clay molds to melt the wax.<\/p>\n

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Once the molds were empty, another fire was lit, this time inside a circular drum made of refractive (heat resistant) bricks. On top of the charcoal used to create the heat was placed a crucible containing brass taps, bits of copper pipe – anything and everything that would melt and create the ‘bronze’ alloy. Air was blown into this ‘furnace’ by the simple expedient of an electric fan and a piece of old motorbike exhaust pipe!<\/p>\n

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Fresh charcoal was added every few minutes and after about an hour the crucible was glowing with the molten metal inside. Ibrahim<\/strong> then lifted the crucible out of the ‘oven’ …<\/p>\n

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…and poured the molten bronze into the molds.<\/p>\n

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The molds were left to cool down for about three hours before they were broken apart with hammers and chisels to reveal the bronze statue inside.<\/p>\n

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After a fair bit of chiseling and thumping, Ibrahim<\/strong> then attacked the sculptures with an angle grinder to remove the excess metal.<\/p>\n

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The black material is simply the carbonised clay which came into contact with the molten metal, at 1500\u00b0C – fine work with a small brush and a screwdriver will be needed to get everything clean and ready for polishing.<\/p>\n

A really interesting workshop – surprising by it’s contents. With any luck they will be coming back next year!<\/p>\n

Last but by no means least, here’s a portrait of Ibrahim<\/strong> and his ‘magic’ glasses!<\/p>\n

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I’ve recently been hunting around for an artist to help with a project we’re putting together here in Auch. Thankfully\u00a0 I found one – Laure BELLION , and while we were discussing the project, she mentionned the fact that she was involved with another project in Auch which was all about a couple of artists … <\/p>\n

Continuer la lecture de « Bronze Age »<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1282"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1299,"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1282\/revisions\/1299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iangrandjean.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}