Concrete and Fashion

Airi Isoda likes to pull architectural influences into her fashion designs. Using materials commonly found in the construction industry, such as Tyvek and industrial-grade felt, she designs minimalist clothing. And yes, there is concrete in her work, such as this necklace of beads. Isoda has a degree in architecture and works in both Los Angeles and Tokyo.

 

cotton silk shirting / silk charmeuse / concrete

(all images used with permission)

But more surprising is her use of fabric dipped in concrete. To give the fabric flexibility, the concrete surface is intentionally broken. I have seen fabric dipped in concrete before, for sculptural purposes –  but not for clothes that could actually be worn.

felted wool / silk charmeuse lining / cotton / concrete

 

concrete dip shift dress + polka dot romper

Isoda is part of wrk-shp, a multi-disciplinary design collective working in the fields of architecture and fashion.

This work shows off one of concrete's greatest strengths: its ability to remain neutral, to be simply a functional material. It is down-to-earth, and without pretension. And yet it can be used as a metaphor for "material" and encourage the viewer to think about what material means.

Concrete Beads

Often, tools and materials determine a design. I stumbled across this silicone pad in our local hardware store -- a hot plate for pots in the kitchen. It was pale blue and very flexible, divided into open squares of about 5 mm, each hole about 2 mm deep. Silicone is a great mold-making material for concrete, so I bought it not knowing at the time what I would do with it.

5 mm squares after they are released from the silicone mold

First, I was thinking the texture would look great pressed into the surface of a larger concrete sculpture, but then I thought of beads, lots of beads. I sprayed the surface of the pad with a release agent, then mixed up a fairly fine mix of Portland cement and stone dust (1:1), with 10% metakaolin, a bit of black dye and some PVA fibers. This was spread over the surface of the mold, then packed with a small rod into the square spaces, smoothed off, and covered in plastic sheet for a few days. When I pulled the concrete out of the mold, the fibers held most of the squares together, so I used a utility knife to slice them apart. The squares were then immersed in water for about a week.

After the week was up and the concrete was probably 90% cured, I drilled each bead with a .9 mm (.035") metal drill. I drilled from both sides to try and keep the hole centered. The next step was to wet-sand all the surfaces by hand, using a 400 grit sandpaper. This gave a smooth surface to the beads and also got rid of all the surface fibers. To round off the edges (rather than hand sanding such tiny shapes) I tumbled them with steel shot for an hour. When they came out of the tumbler, this is what they looked like among the steel shot:

Tiny square concrete beads in steel shot

The plan is to use these concrete beads in some minimal jewellery designs, such as the partly completed earrings below.

Draft earring design, sterling, titanium, concrete

Isaac Cordal's little concrete people

Isaac Cordal makes little people out of concrete and them places them in thought-provoking situations in various cities and countries in Europe. You can find them in the street, sitting on rooftops, precariously balanced on a pipe, standing up to their waists in water with a life preserver, or standing in the snow. The figures are made in clay, then a silicone mold is made in which the concrete is cast. Some of the figures are painted some left grey.

Some of Cordal's work is mechanized, but I particularly like the small quiet figures.

Street Art London also has an excellent interview with Cordal along with other photographs of his work. A new book has also just been published about Cordal's work called Cement Eclipses, available from Carpet Bombing Culture.

Pillar of Shame

 

 Wikemedia Commons

This concrete statue, the Pillar of Shame, is in Hong Kong, and commemorates the 50 people who died in Tienanmen Square in Beijing in the government crackdown of 1989. The inscription reads "The old cannot kill the young forever." In 2008 it was painted orange to raise awareness about human rights in China.

This website has links to a number sites with more information and photographs.

http://www.aidoh.dk/?categoryID=62

The sculpture, by Danish artist Jens Galschiot depicts torn and twisted bodies. Galschiot was not allowed in to Hong Kong when it was painted orange but approved of the transformation.

http://regnirts.blogspot.com/2008/04/hong-kong-pillar-of-shame.html

Concrete Sculpture Finished

Well, it took me two weeks to finish off the sculpture that I showed last time on this blog. It took several thin layers of cement on top of what I showed June 14, one of them dyed with a brick-coloured pigment, as you can see from this image. The two parts rest against each other and form a tripod as a base.

Leaning, concrete sculpture, 2010

I toned down the stripes quite a bit from the last images; they seemed to detract too much from the forms. One thing you can't see are six-inch rods coming out of the base of the forms. They are embedded in the grass for additional support. I set the bolts in the concrete by drilling then filling the holes with a concrete epoxy, the kind used in the construction industry for setting lag bolts into foundation walls.

The sculpture is now in the Artful Garden exhibition at Jon and Suzann Partridge's studio in Muskoka, Ontario.
http://www.theartfulgarden.ca/

More on the Concrete Sculpture

I took some photographs of the recent concrete sculpture I have been working on. The structure (armature) is steel rebar with steel mesh wrapped around that. The sculpture is in two parts that will be resting on each other, separate but together, in the final piece.

My original idea was black and white stripes on the branch-like forms, but I toned down the really strong contrast. The first photo shows the thin black-pigmented cement after being applied. I used masking tape to keep the smooth mixture in the right places. When the cement had cured enough (about 24 hours) I peeled off the tape and wet sanded the piece. Then I scratched grooves in the surface with very coarse sandpaper (16 grit) and an old file, followed by an application of a thin layer of white Portland cement and metakaolin that covered everything. The next photo shows the application of that thin white layer.

You can see the scratches made in the black in the photo. The white smooth mix is rubbed into those grooves so that when most of the white is sanded off, the lines would show as white. After I did this I then did the revese colour process—scratching that surface again, but this time rubbing a thin black layer over everything. After this cures I will wet sand it off with something like a 320 grit paper to reveal (hopefully) a very complex and interesting surface.

In the meantime both pieces of the sculpture are wrapped in plastic to allow them to damp cure.

Sketches for a Sculpture

I've been working on a concrete sculpture for a couple of weeks now. My ideas started with some very brief sketches with the idea of dependency and relationship. I like the idea of one object leaning on another one so that they are both in a sense holding each other up. I have also been thinking about the number of projects I had been working on all at the same time, and debating internally whether that was a bad thing ("to do anything well you have to do only one thing without distraction") or a good thing ("creativity comes out of chaos").

The first images in my sketchbook were simple line drawings, and then I tested some of those ideas by bending the forms in copper wire, to see how gravity and geometry would work with those ideas. Then I made two separate armatures out of steel rebar and expanded steel mesh (stucco lath), then made a mixture of cement, sand and polystyrene beads which I pushed into and through the lath. I used this lightweight mixture because the pieces are about six feet long, and I wanted to be able to lift them. Over a period of several days I applied thinner layers of white Portland cement mixed with white sand onto the surface of the growing shapes. That's about where I am now, applying thinner and smoother layers of alternating bands of white cement and black pigmented cement as final finishes.

This morning I found a scrap of paper on which I had written some notes and done a couple of little sketches. It was about half-way through the design process, so I thought I would scan it and share it. I also seem to have resolved the conflict about working on many things at once. I had written "creativity is something your brain does when you're working on something else", then edited it to "creativity is something your brain does when you're thinking of something else." This must have been influenced by the Zen directive in brush painting: "It is not I that am doing this." Under that I wrote: "That's my excuse for doing so many things at once."

I'll post some pictures soon of the sculpture as it develops. At the same time I am continuing to make and market jewellery, and I am also trying to tie up a project I started a few months ago which is neither concrete-related or jewellery-related.