"Making a Monument" Bronze Sculpture by Edd Hayes fine bronze sculptor

"As a sculptor I just do what I need to do," says Edd Hayes, who, from September 24 to December 6, 1991, converted the south end of Houston's Astrohall into a huge studio where he enlarged his 18-by-56-inch maquette WILD AND FREE. At one-and-a-half times life-size, the six horses were sculpted in five months-a task that Hayes estimates would have taken 18 months using traditional methods. Instead, Hayes used a "pointing up" process devised in the early 1980s by Colorado sculptor Gerald Balciar [SWA JUL 85].

Hayes holds in his hand a small wax horse-a model taken from the original one-eighth life-size version. The models were used to make plaster casts, which were cut apart. "It was like slicing meat into ¼-inch-thick wafers," explains Hayes. "The wafers were numbered, then laid on an overhead projector and projected up 13 times. Paper patterns of the projected images were used to create plywood wafers that were reassembled on a rod and covered with cheesecloth and clay."

Balciar says an advantage to the wafer enlarging process is that it saved clay. Instead of a solid model, only an inch or two of clay is needed to cover the wooden forms. Still, the clay models for WILD AND FREE weighed some 3,000 pounds. Hayes recycled 6,000 pounds of clay by stripping the clay from each sculpture once the molds were removed and applying it to another horse's frame.

In preparation for casting, the clay horses were covered with rubber/latex mixture and then plaster. Once hardened, the plaster for each horse was cut into 45 sections that were color-coded and numbered. The plaster sections were loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to Lands End Sculpture Foundry, Paonia, CO, where Bob and Mary Zimmerman, with the help of foundry people and local students, cut the plaster again-usually into four smaller sections. The reassembled bronze sections were welded, hammered, sandblasted, treated with liver of sulphur for patina, and warmed for final shaping, polishing and waxing. Then they were once again loaded onto the truck and transported back to Houston for installation.

Although the cast bronze is only ¼-inch to 1/8-inch thick, each horse weighs between 1,500 to 2,500 pounds. What holds them up? Sculptors use engineering tricks to make such large bronzes hold shape and remain upright. The WILD AND FREE horses are anchored to their pedestals by stainless-steel rods running down the insides of their legs.

Southwest Art
April 1994