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Past Work - Teapotty: Nails

  Teapot made from nails  Completed teapot
 
  Matt Thomas nail sculpture My inspiration for this  project came partly from the sculpture pictured, made by Matt Thomas in response to a "summer project" at Plymouth College of Art.

In research for this project, I came across a few other artists that have used nails in sculpture, notably John Bisbeeh and Gunther Uecker
 
  Wax teapot My starting point was one of the wax teapots I'd already made.

I wanted to press nails through the walls of the pot, fill the pot with something (my original thought was plaster dyed red) and then steam off the wax so the nail heads formed the surface of the teapot.
 
  Pressing hot nails into a wax teapot I decided to use "clout nails", ones often used for roofing jobs, because of their disc-like heads.  I heated them up with a paint-stripping tool and pushed them into the teapot as shown.
 
  Inside of nail teapot The inside of the teapot looked so dramatic that I decided to fill the teapot with clear resin, rather than plaster dyed red, so the nails would remain visible.


 
  Handle of nail teapot I toyed with welding the nails together to create the handle but eventually decided to echo the inside of the teapot and reveal the whole nails by sliding them into holes drilled in a resin handle and gluing them into position with Araldite.

I added extensions to the resin handle so that it could be embedded in the resin interior of the teapot.

The photo is of a mock-up, before I drilled the holes in the handle.
 
  Resin lide for nail teapot  I used a similar strategy for the lid. I cast it in resin (using a Gelflex mould), drilled holes and glued in nails using Araldite (after cropping them to the right length).
 
  Nail teapot nearing completion I cut off the wax handle, made holes in the wall of the teapot and fastened the handle in place by surrounding the joints with clay.

Then I poured resin into the teapot, an inch or so at a time, so that it didn't overheat as it cured, which might have melted the wax.

After I'd completed filling the teapot with resin I steamed off the wax.

This left a sort of resin "stem" up the inside of the spout.  I drilled holes into this and glued in cropped nails to complete the teapot.
 
     
     
     
     

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