Cement Casting and a Doll House

Hello everyone,I'm sorry I missed last Friday's post but the past week was extraordinarily busy. I'm posting just some of the images I took this past week.

The photos copyright by Art  Di Lella                       The Doll House copyright   Susan Kordalewski

This is the cement project that I mentioned in my last post. It's a Cement Doll House by the artist
Susan Kordalewski.
I would like to give a little bit of background information first. Back in the late fall,Susan had contacted me about a post she had seen on my blog about concrete casting for the artist Chris Curreri. She was referring to a post that I had published in November of 2011. Susan was interested in having a doll house moulded and cast in cement. There are some serious technical problems with this idea, first many of the details such as shingles, gingerbread elements, windows and doors have severe undercutting plus the artist had requested that the individual rooms be cast as well. The other problem is cement is not ideal for casting thin walls with delicate details,so we needed a different approach.
I suggested to Susan that perhaps instead of moulding a real doll house,the more practical method was to make a mould form out of plywood in the shape of a doll house. Then the issues regarding undercutting would be eliminated and the details such as windows could be moulded and cast separately.
So, Susan went back to her studio and constructed the mould and delivered it to my studio at the end of February.  Afterwards, I quickly moulded the details for the doll house and worked out how to make the cast rooms.  I started the cement casting of the basic doll house form around March 13th and completed it on March 16th. By the way, the method used to make the cast rooms is hinted at in the first image.Take a guess.
Anyways,it all worked out and Susan picked up her cement doll house sculpture Friday evening and delivered to her gallery in Montreal QC.

This work by  Susan Kordalewski is being exhibited right now at Sporobole Centre on Art, Sherbrooke Q.C
I'll have another post tomorrow on  my Hyper Realistic Figure, Homo Erectus. Talk to you then. Cheers.