Medal Project

The medal project is quite different to anything I’ve worked on before in terms of the strict guidelines I had to work within, and in terms of the physical method of creation. The process forced me to reflect on my practice and normal way of working in order to understand what is of most importance and what I would therefore like to incorporate into my medal. The first realisation I had was the importance of materiality; I work almost exclusively around stone due to its deep time connotations, so to be presented with bronze felt a little jarring. It was also odd to not have a reason to be working within the format of a medal other than just the competition, and so again my instinct was to make it something slightly more sculptural, moving away from the prescribed ‘medal’ format and towards something that could have arisen naturally within my own work.

The materiality of the medal was what I focused on most heavily with my initial ideas and research:

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The comparison of bronze to stone immediately made me think of the Stone Age and Bronze Age, the vast human timescales wrapped up within this, the contrast of these human timescales to deep time, and then the existence of the landscape (where the materials are taken from) in comparison to this. In researching the Bronze Age – a topic that goes hand-in-hand with the general importance of bronze in the advancement of human society – I learnt bronze is a mixture of copper and tin (both naturally occurring and requiring the intervention of humans to extract and mix to make bronze), and how before the Bronze Age was the lesser-known Copper Age. Britain was one of the last landmasses to join the Copper Age but the discovery of tin, in Cornish tin deposits, led to the start of the Bronze Age. I like the idea that stone is a found material, perhaps quite an intuitive material, whereas bronze is something that has to be made, a collaboration between human and land, therein summarising the advancement of humanity between the Stone and Bronze Age (and interesting to consider this extrapolated beyond just these two and if a linear relationship between our material age and the sophistication of society exists). Although I haven’t gone on to use this information explicitly in my medal I thoroughly enjoyed this research and I find it especially interesting to consider this coincidental local connection to the material; this contextualising research allowed bronze to feel more familiar and more personal, a relevant material that could work to compliment my stone work.

Considering Cornish tin led me to consider tin mines, how these are an example of human impact on landscapes, and more widely how landscapes change with time, particularly contrasting the human-made changes with the geological changes. These timescales also pushed me to consider the longevity of the medal I would be making, and how this could be incorporated into the design; I explored the idea of using it almost as a time capsule, leaving a message, perhaps even having a void or an artefact sealed in the centre. While these are all ideas that I feel have potential (and could be something to revisit in the future?), I felt they were perhaps getting a little abstract, or at least were hard to pin down in terms of creating actual imagery from them. I ran the risk of doing too much research and overwhelming myself with ideas, all a little too abstract to know exactly what to make from them. I wanted to find an inbetween space wherein my medal wouldn’t be too literal but equally not too abstract.

To ensure I didn’t get stuck in the research phase, trying to cram too many big ideas into the plan for the medal, I started making some rough maquettes. I knew I wanted the medal to be quite tactile, something that made the most of the small, hand-held quality that medals possess. I considered various iterations of how this would manifest itself; I played with the idea of having the medal be purely a cast of the void between two hands, thinking about the timelessness of the human hand (in human timescales at least), and this idea of a negative/inverse playing in quite nicely with my wider body of work. However the guidelines for the medal project were that the medal shouldn’t be a ‘sculptural object’ and I felt that this verged on the sculptural rather than a medal with two distinct sides. I therefore experimented with taking various impressions from a hand, and also played around with how this could interact with the other side of the medal. To me the palm lines looked like tiny landscapes so I tried carving topographic forms out of them, and also tried carving an aerial/topographic view of a local quarry to allude to this link with Cornish tin.

Although I liked this idea of hand-based landscapes, there was something about the delicacy of the palm imprints that clashed with the more aggressively-carved landscapes. I therefore started looking for different ways to form a landscape, striking upon taking impressions from a rock which was immediately far more successful; the tiny, delicate landscapes formed from the rock worked hand-in-hand with the delicate palm impression and the landscape had this indecipherable scale, blurring the boundary between the macro and the micro, something I have also been exploring in my wider body of work.

Although I didn’t set out with the intention of including text on my medal, as part of wider research I came across an extract of Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

I feel this eloquently sums up the transience and ephemerality of the landscape within deep time (and also humans by comparison) that I had been dancing around, and as such I chose to lift the line ‘they melt like mist, the solid lands’ and use it on the medal. I also intend to title the medal (and) nothing stands as a continued reference to the poem. The next step was then deciding on the placement of the text; I liked the text gently written into the surface of the medal, emphasising a certain hand-made element, playing into the idea of the tactile, but I wasn’t sure exactly on the placement:

I considered having the writing across both sides of the medal – ‘they melt like mist’ on the ‘human’ side and ‘the solid lands’ on the ‘land’ side – but this didn’t hold up to practical consideration; when presenting the medal I want side A to be the land side and the positioning of the text would then imply the quote reads ‘the solid lands they melt like mist’ – still arguably the same idea but not the intended quote. This ambiguity over the order of the text (I didn’t feel the two halves related as well if swapped over), as well as an ambiguity over if the two lines were even linked if they were placed so separately, lead me to select the placement of the text on only the land side, ingrained neatly into the landscape.

The next challenge was then choosing a material which worked for both picking up the rock impression but also for holding the text. The air drying clay worked best for taking impressions (hence it is what I used for the palm side), but due to the fibers in the material it would bead a lot more when the text was written in. Wax was far better for clear text but was much harder to shape into a crisp impression. The compromise I eventually came to was to heat the wax with a heat gun in order to mold it as much as possible to the rock, and then write into this. Unfortunately I still don’t feel the rock lines are quite as crisp as they could be but I think more than enough of the surface has been recorded to capture the idea, and a compromise between the text and the impression would always mean one wouldn’t be quite as clear as possible.

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The slightly imperfect, hand-made look of the medal was something that I was looking to emphasise, still incorporating this sense of tactility, and this was something that made the matching up the two sides a little tricky. As the shape of the medal wasn’t a perfect circle, more an irregular, organically formed shape, it was hard to make them both the same. I made the wax side first but the difficultly was, unlike the clay side, the wax would never be fully hardened so easier to damage the delicate surface in the process of matching the sides. I got around this as much as possible with a cardboard cut out and then made some new clay palm imprints and tried to cut these to size, again being careful to avoid damaging the delicate impressions in the still-wet clay. I also made an effort for the contours on both sides to match up somewhat as I enjoy this idea of a more subtle sculptural link between the two, although this again was hard to do without damaging either of the fragile surfaces.

Both sides were then cast in wax (we tried painting in wax layers but found the two matches up fairly well simply pouring the wax in) and then I fettled down the edges to match them up as much as possible. I also added some brown wax in this process, trying to ensure subtle fingerprint marks were caught in this to add onto the hand-made feel of the medal.

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The medal now needs to be cast in bronze, fettled down a little more and then have a patina applied. I’m not exactly sure what the patina process entails but I know that I don’t want to include any artificial colours, instead preferring to bring out the bronze colour as much as possible and also highlight the surface texture in the process.

Another important part of the process, in my case at least, is the accompanying writing. As I have so many threads and ideas feeding into the project I feel it is important that the writing is able to draw attention to these where perhaps the medal does not, on its own, make it so explicit. The difficulty comes in finding a balance whereby I don’t list every idea and piece of research I feel is relevant but also I am able to signpost just how much thought has gone into the fairly simple design. I started by setting myself the challenge of summarising the project in less than 25 words, producing the following:

Stone Age, Bronze Age,
copper and Cornish tin.
Hands form shallow mines in
lands formed by deep time;
all flows and nothing stands.

I then also wrote the following paragraph, perhaps a more conventional piece of accompanying writing:

Within my practice I commonly work with stone, using it to explore materiality and its associated sense of deep time. Moving to bronze I therefore felt a sense of progression mimicking that of our early ancestors, a movement from stone age to bronze age, from scavenging to shaping the land. My medal examines this interaction between human and landscape and the transience of both; if even the landscape does not stand, where does this place the human instant by comparison?

I am still a little torn about whether I have highlighted enough of the threads of research and thoughts behind the medal, or whether I need to make any of them more explicit. As the writing does not need to be submitted for a couple of months I will most likely leave it as is for now and see how I feel coming back to it with fresh eyes. Either way, I do feel that writing a summative piece alongside an artwork is a great way of being made to synthesise all the relevant information and present it in an accessible way, and as such perhaps is something I should endeavor to bring into my practice more often.

All in all, the medal project has been an interesting new way of working, pushing me outside my comfort zone and forcing me to adapt my usual way of working, in the process extracting and highlighting what it is I find most important in my work. I still have mixed feelings about the medal as a concept; it is not something I feel I can bring into my own work as it is too specific a medium to work in without a strong historical (or perhaps material) link, but I have definitely learned and gained an appreciation for the medal as an art form.

In terms of my particular medal, I am pleased with how it has turned out; I feel I have successfully distilled a vast range of research and ideas of deep time into a small, simple design, highlighting to myself in the process what is of most importance to me in terms of my wider body of work. The idea of the hand and the land coming together to make bronze sums up my investigation into materiality well, and I do quite like the way this isn’t perhaps an explicit meaning but another, more hidden, meaning that gives the medal a sense of depth. There is a sense of a timeless landscape, yet equally one that is itself subject to the passing of time, one that can be held in the palm of the hand yet represents something far vaster – all themes that link to my wider body of work. Logistically, too, the process of creating the medal relates to the way I work outside of the project in terms of the iterative process it required, as well as highlighting the importance of a sustained commitment and patience to bring the final product into being.

*later edit* finished medal: