“Put Your Chin in There”

Hand portraits of the Ophthalmologist and the Child Psychologist

Bronze, 2022

My father’s hands, with shadows cast by the setting sun, in my studio, October 2022.

My mother’s hands, October 2022:

In December 2019, I visited my nonagenarian parents in London, for what would turn out to be the last time in eighteen months, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I brought with me some alginate (body safe casting material) to make molds of their hands—something I’d been thinking of doing for a while, given their advanced age.

My father sat through the few minutes required for the alginate to set around his right hand, muttering (with a customary grin) “Now I’ll have to walk around with my hand in bucket of pink goo for the rest of my life.”

He didn’t have the patience to let me do his left hand. And given the mess I’d already made of their apartment kitchen—with all the plaster mixing and alginate de-molding—I didn’t feel I should press my luck.

I had to wait until May 2021, when international travel to England was (with lots of paperwork and many COVID tests) feasible once again, to capture his left hand, and both of my mother’s hands.

In spring 2022, I tidied up the plaster casts, fixing lots of glitches along the way (my mother’s engagement ring was particularly tricky). And then made the rubber molds around the plasters—which looked like rubber mittens—and built plaster mother-molds around them, to keep the flexible rubber in proper alignment when pouring foundry wax into their hand-shaped hollows. After filling in a veritable Milky Way of tiny air bubbles with disclosing wax, constructing the sprue system around each wax hand, and building the ceramic shells around the hands, they were “poured” in late July. And then the “chasing” began: cutting off the sprues, grinding, bead blasting, more fine-tuning with pneumatic tools… This is the “Lost Wax” bronze-casting process, in all its tedious glory!

It was good to be able to show my father his bronze hands, on another trip to London in September 2022—just a few weeks before he passed away.