My Sculpture Techniques with Polyester Resin

Leonardo, Vol. 5, pp. 152-154. PergamonPress 1972. Printed in Great Britain MY SCULPTURE TECHNIQUES WITH POLYESTER RESIN Peggy Goldstein* Why use plastic for sculpture is not a new question but it is still askable because somany other materials exist, both old and new [I-71. Polyester resin, laminated with fiberglass (hereafter referred to asLPR) hasmany of the advantages of clay, except for touch, without the fragility; lighter than reinforced concrete and capable of strong thin forms and details; less expensive than bronze it can be worked by the sculptor alone from start to finish; lighter than wood or stone, with no inherent limitations of grain or of block size; less equipment necessary than for weldingmetal. Moreover , a greater range of colors is possible with the resin than with any of these other materials, since the sculpture may be opaque or translucent. Of course, LPR is not without disadvantages. It does not have the inherent beauty we find in marble. It smells terrible. Certain safety precautions are always necessary [5] as is also true for many other materials used by sculptors. From LPR a wide variety of kinds of sculpture can be made: thin, strong, delicate forms; closed, large, bulbous forms; light or heavy pieces in a wide choice of colors that may be translucent or opaque. Furthermore, it is weather-resistant and very durable, and withstands stressesof compression and tension. What a relief it is to work on a sculpture twice my own size knowing that I can easily move it and place it in any position. The first laminated sculptures that I made were under the tutelage of a chemist who was developing resins and wanted to see them in actual sculptural use. Books and articlesabout LPR [I, 2,3,6] as well as prowling around boat and auto repair shops were useful in introducing me to related materials and to alternative methods. Rigid polyurethane foam is my usual armature or core material because it is close-grained and easy to cut, abrade and glue. It takes finer detail than polystyrene and does not need to be isolated from the resin. (Polystyrene is less expensive and can be cut quickly with hot wires, a process that is unsatisfactory and dangerous with polyurethane, but there must be an insulating layer between polystyrene and polyester resin.) * American artist living at 6 Square Emmanuel Chabrier, 75-Paris, 17, France. (Received24 July 1971.) ‘Peril Bleu’ (cf. Fig. 1) is built over an armature of rigid polyurethane foam. The first two or three coats are LPR. The outer layer is opaque ‘Polybeton ’ (tradename for a filled resin produced in France by Soloplast, St. Egreve near Grenoble and closely resembling the U.S.product called ‘Bondo’) [7] into which blue powdered gouache pigment was mixed before catalyzing. The surface was polished with wetldry abrasive up to 400 fineness and then waxed. I am not sure that the color is fast, however after 15 months it has not faded. ‘Multicolore’ (cf. Fig. 2) was made essentially by the same process as ‘Peril Bleu’ but without a coat of ‘Polybeton’. The gouache pigments were mixed directly into the transparent resin in small quantities until the color desired was obtained. Gouache powder is not soluble in LPR and mixes unevenly, which permits a wide variety of hues to be selected. Colored resin and mat mixtures were superimposed whenever desired for thickness and color as soon as the LPR set. Parts that are less than 2 in. thick are translucent in strong light. ‘Broken Whelk‘ (cf. Fig. 3) was made to be partly translucent. It is almost of uniform thickness (about +in.) and is a relatively complicated form. I carved the armature of polyurethane foam and then covered one-half of the entire shape with LPR, using a mat, not cloth, fiberglass layer for reinforcement. The next step was the removal, by scraping, of the armature. This meant that while the fiberglasslayer had to be sturdy and thin, it also had to avoid trapping any bits of the armature material. Then followed another coat of LPR, abrading with rifflers and polishing with wet/dry papers, and, finally, a coat of wax. This is obviously only a partial solution...