Why is sculpture a language?
I didn't come up with calling sculpture a language — that's just how people talk about it: sculptural language, the language of art, what language a work speaks. Essentially, it's a tautology if you translate Russian into Russian: it's believed that a work of art has the ability to speak to us.
Sculpture comes easily to me — maybe because I used to be a professional athlete. Working with volume, movement, and form feels natural to me. That's not the case for everyone: many artists can't sculpt at all. And conversely, I've often heard from sculptors that they don't make sketches of any kind — no two-dimensional sketches, no drawings. For them, sculpture is sculpture, and drawing is drawing, and the two never cross paths.
How do you choose a material — clay, bronze, ceramics?
Often it's a matter of mood — after all, I'm a woman artist. But there are also longer periods: a wave comes, and, for example, right now I'm working on porcelain sculpture.
The thing is, creating a work of art requires a huge amount of energy, and at any given moment that energy is limited. You can't be in several places at once, so you have to choose a material. Ceramics, bronze casting, modeling with plasticine, painting with high-temperature glazes fired at 1300 degrees — all of this takes so much time that once you've picked a technique and, so to speak, gotten your hands dirty in the studio, you'll be stuck with it for months to come. This is the materialization of ideas — I call it crystallization: you translate sketches into material, and that takes both effort and time. There's no snapping your fingers and — poof — the pumpkin turns into a carriage. It just doesn't work that way.
To create a single bronze sculpture, you first make a model out of plasticine, then a mold. There are various modern methods — scanning, for instance: today sculpture can be created using 3D printers that print both bronze and ceramics. It depends on which path you take. If you go the mold-making route, you make a piece mold from the plasticine model. Some people sculpt in clay; I prefer plasticine because it doesn't dry out and lets me work according to my mood.
A multi-piece mold is made — one that can be disassembled and reassembled. Wax is poured into it. It sounds like all this happens in a day, but in reality it takes months, sometimes even years — a lot depends on the size. This is heavy work, and physically it's often more than one person can handle alone, especially a woman. The processes are technically very labor-intensive, and new technologies certainly help here.
After the mold is cast, it's taken apart and work begins on the wax copy: refining it, cleaning up the seams left where the mold pieces joined — wax seeps in there. Once the wax model is ready, another mold is made, but this time a single-use one — metal will be poured into it to take the wax's place. Then the mold is broken apart, the metal is cleaned up, brought to the desired finish, polished, and a chemical patina is applied — in other words, the bronze is toned. It's a long process, and essentially, by choosing a material you're committing many months ahead, sometimes even years.
Describe the journey from first touching the material to the finished bronze
Well, I've basically just described that journey step by step. I love working with plasticine. If I use clay, I make quick sketches, scan them, and print them out using new technologies — in plastic, bronze, or porcelain.
If we're talking about the classical method, it's the same process: a model is made, a multi-piece mold is taken (the materials vary too), the mold is assembled, and wax is poured in. Then the mold is disassembled again — it's reusable — and the wax model is worked on, bringing the sculpture to perfection. After that, it's placed in a single-use mold, which will later be broken once the metal appears inside it. The metal is poured at a temperature of about 1000 degrees; at that temperature the wax melts away completely, and metal takes its place.
There are a great many subtleties here — it takes years of study and skill, because metal solidifies differently each time, it can "tear itself apart," and not every mold will do. All of this has to be thought through at the working stage.
Once the metal has taken the place of the wax, the mold is broken apart and the cleaning of the metal begins. There can be holes, and there are so-called "sprues" — wax rods attached to different parts of the sculpture so that the metal flows in evenly from different sides, because pouring it all in one go from top to bottom doesn't always work. After the mold is broken, these sprues are cut off with an angle grinder, and holes are welded shut — sometimes the metal bubbles up inside the mold. Then comes sandblasting, because voids and other surface defects can appear during casting. And once the sculpture is fully cleaned up and ready, a chemical formula is chosen for toning — bronze isn't painted, after all, it's chemically toned. The whole process is long, labor-intensive, and requires training and knowledge.
What emotions do different materials evoke — what's the tactile experience like?
As I said, drawing and sculpture are different experiences, with different emotions and different tactile sensations. People who do sculpture don't always draw, and those who draw very rarely do sculpture. Apparently different receptors are involved, different sensations — perhaps even different areas of the brain. That's just my own loose speculation.
Have there been materials that disappointed you, failed experiments?
I can't even recall anything like that. If there's something you don't know how to do — that's what a failed experiment is, because any visual art requires skill and knowledge. When you lack experience, something doesn't work out, and time and materials have already been spent — that's when you feel disappointment.
How does casting technology influence the creative process?
There really are a great many constraints, but it's hard to explain on the fly, because besides being creative, it's also a very physical process. It's like marriage: you fall in love, there's romance — but there are also practical, everyday things without which the whole thing just won't survive. It's not a movie you watch in two hours — it's life, and it goes on for a very long time.
Casting technology requires, first of all, a special talent and the ability to work with volume — it's not drawing, I'll say it again. And a certain quality of character: the ability to wait and persist, because that's something you have to learn. First you learn the craft, and then, through the piece you're making, you learn to see the final result and to wait for it, to sit it out. It's a quality of both the soul and the character.
What is lost and what is gained in the transition from plasticine to bronze?
Ideally, there's no transformation at all: what you sculpt is exactly what you later see in bronze. But that's not always how it turns out, because materials have their own technical limitations, and something that can be done in plasticine is sometimes simply impossible to do in bronze. So when you sculpt, if you know the casting technique, you take that into account — consciously or unconsciously — right from the moment you're creating the piece. But if you don't have that knowledge, you might sculpt something that simply can't be cast at all. That happens too. If a person has the skill and the knowledge, they factor this in from the start, because not everything that can be sculpted can be cast. And if there's no knowledge — you either get a beautiful surprise, or nothing works out at all.
How did you learn to work with different materials?
I believe this is a matter of character — the ability to wait, to work hard. There's practically no instant result here. An artist is a journey: you work and work, and gradually you find yourself, your own way of working.
On one hand I'm an ambitious person, and on the other, very curious, so I've worked with a great many materials. In the early days of my creative work, I often noticed that each piece seems to want itself and choose its own material — you just need to clearly hear and feel which material this particular idea wants to be embodied in. It's a joint project: on one side there's you, and on the other, your idea, and it tells you, through the language of intuition and your own inner "wants," which material it wants to be rendered in.
The fact that I've mastered many techniques is the result of years of life, hard work, the desire to evolve, and curiosity about learning new things. I think I'll be learning my whole life — I'll never learn it all.
Is there a material you haven't tried yet but would like to?
I really love enamels. I've seen how they're worked with in Georgia, in Europe — cloisonné enamel. I've never worked with mosaic or stained glass, but at the very top of my wish list is cloisonné enamel specifically — it resonates with me deeply. In the past I worked with engraving, with etching, and I do a lot of work with glazes on porcelain. And I can see that if you combine etching with glazed porcelain, you get exactly this kind of metal enamel — as I understand it, etching is used there too. I don't fully know this technique yet, but I really want to learn it. When Tsereteli was still alive, I told him that all of this was wonderful, but that enamels specifically were what I'd want to learn from him.