While growing up I spent most of my weekends running around my late aunt’s backyard. In the springs and summers it was always filled with beautiful flowers and fresh vegetables along with spare garden decor. Out of all the fun shapes and figurines, the ones that stuck out to me the most were the pinwheels which would spin along as the crisp, fresh wind caressed my warm, sweaty skin. The seasons changed, the flowers stopped blooming, the vegetables became dormant but the pinwheels remained, spinning along the winds of harsh storms, or being buried in clumps of snow.
In the summer of 2023 I will gather one of my aunt’s remaining pinwheels and create a plaster mold of it, which will be followed by experimenting with the technique of slip casting.
The goal is to begin this project in the month of June. With trial and error, which I am sure I will face with my first rodeo with the art of slip casting, the first phase of this project which is making the mold will be completed by the end of August with the plaster provided by the school’s ceramic studio. By the time the semester of Fall 2023 begins I will be able to use the ceramic studio along with the guidance of my instructor to slip cast and begin making prototypes of the mold. The piece will then be bisque fired, followed by surfacing with glaze and a second glaze firing.
The casted pinwheel will be about 5% to 20% smaller than the original piece which is about a foot tall considering the shrinking rate of terracotta and porcelain slip. I intend to make several pinwheels, some glazed and some underglazed. The beauty of a plaster mold is that you can make as many similar or identical items as you would like, because the foundation is already there for you. I will add pinwheels as i see fit, it could be ten, it could be twenty, each being one of a kind.
Elsa Da Silva Calero was the second person in my family to immigrate into the United States of America at 23 years old during the decade of the 70s. She faced many of the same struggles other immigrants face today, such as being arrested by immigration officers and nearly facing deportation. Elsa dealt with a lot of trauma caused by her journey as a once undocumented immigrant of color.
As the pinwheels in her backyard remain, her memory and story does too.
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