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Lost wax casting
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Lost wax casting (also called investment casting, precision casting or cire perdue in French) is the process by which a duplicate metal sculpture often silver gold bronze is cast from an original sculpture.
Bronze objects have been cast using the lost wax method (cire perdue) for at least 5000 years.
It is said the method of lost wax casting has been practised on the African continent for centuries. It appears West African sculptors were casting brass with this method for several hundred years prior to the arrival of the first Portuguese explorers along the coast in 1484. The ancient Greeks and Romans had a long history of making statues in bronze and over the course more than a thousand years created hundreds of statues.
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A lot of our pieces start with a clay sculpture. Working with clay can be frustrating, often we work at them over the weekends or evenings. The finer and smaller the object is going to be the more difficult and there is a deal of frustration at times and of course artistic temperament! Legs and trunks often need a metal armature underneath to support the clay.
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A mold is created which is the exact negative of the original sculpture or life form. For our shell collection we use the original shell. Wax is then melted and poured into the mold. These are the inner molds. The wax mold is placed into a container and investment – similar to Plaster Of Paris – is poured around it.
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Once hardened the container is placed in a kiln and the wax is melted out leaving a negative of the sculpture within the hardened investment. This is called burnout. Liquid metal, in our case silver or gold, is poured into the empty mold, the negative of the sculpture, using a centrifugal casting machine and then left to cool and harden.
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Later the investment exterior is broken open, revealing the silver or gold sculpture or piece of jewellery. The cleaning and finishing and polishing then starts. Any traces of investment are first removed. Then any rough edges are sanded or filed away. Progressively finer grades of sanding papers are used and at this stage the silver is still a dull grey colour. Only when this is perfect, does the polishing begin, from a first rough polish to the last fine buffing to produce the highest gloss finish. This final stage can often be as lengthy and painstaking as the initial carving and moulding. Particularly on the smaller objects or those with fine detail.
