Edinburgh Napier University

  The experimental aluminium sand-cast bowls shown in the attached portfolio are part of a practice-based auto-ethnographic heuristic research inquiry into knowledge in doing.
John Dunnigan’s essay on Thinking (2013) describes practice-led/based research by referring to “critical making” as the “symbiotic relationship” between thinking and making, and describing artists and designers as “form givers who bring ideas into the material world.” (Dunnigan, 2013, p.95). In this vein, these experiments explore the use of discarded packaging as a waste mould for sand cast design-craft objects. In particular, the partly completed objects, with the pouring gate (or sprue) still attached, can make for compelling debate in the visual articulation of the making process.
I was inspired to work with the sandcasting process after watching a film of UK designer Max Lamb casting a pewter stool in the sand on a Cornish beach. Marcus Fairs, editor-in-chief of Dezeen, summarises video thus: “the video [of the process] is as much the cultural artefact as the stool itself.” (Fairs, 2011)
I have previously used expanded polystyrene (EPS), a much-used waste mould material, with varying success. The use of bubble-wrap was inspired by Czech designer Rony Plesl’s glass Bubbles Bowl (made using an entirely different process) – the what if…? possibility of molten metal passing into the bubble spaces immediately came to my mind. The bubble-wrap has been formed over mdf patterns, which are removed before installing the other half of the sand mould.
In the first iterations of this process, the molten aluminium has not been able to flow all the way through the mould, but in later versions additional layers have been added to create more space.