Sample

The first time I stayed at the art school until midnight making a mold, the plaster room began to feel very surreal to me. Perhaps this was because I was alone in that wing of the building, or maybe it was the way the metal shop, crowded with equipment that loomed ominously in the dark, connected to the ceramics studio, and how the ceramics studio connected to the kiln room which connected back to the plaster studio like a Pac-Man maze. It all felt like the setting for a video game, or perhaps a nightmare, with how the rooms and hallways seemed haphazardly crushed together in an odd loop. It reminded me of a dream I'd had where the door to the ceramics room lead somehow into my high school locker room, which wound down and down and down into a labyrinth. The whole place put me on edge. 

​

Mold making itself is a meticulous process. The step by step of it eroded my paranoia until it was just a whisper in the back of my mind. I went on autopilot. 

​

Making a mold begins with a positive. You take an object, found or created, and determine how many sides the mold needs to have. You divide the object into parts in your mind. Each side of a mold needs to be able to pull away cleanly from the object, or else your mold won’t be a mold; it will be a plaster tomb. So you make sure it can pull away cleanly.

​

On this particular night, I was making a two sided mold.

​

For a two sided mold, find the seam of your object. Embed half of it in clay. The exposed side will become the first half of the mold once you pour plaster over it. Grease the object and the clay so the plaster does not adhere to it.

​

I poured some of the Murphy’s Oil Soap into the palm of my hand. It was bright orange- like, Dayquil orange- and very slippery. It seemed to absorb into the piece as I lathered it on.

​

Grease it three or four times. Tightly clamp wooden boards around the object in a square. Seal the cracks with clay. This is where you will pour your plaster to make the first half of your mold. Then, put on your respirator and latex gloves, and turn on the vent fan to mix your plaster. Get a bucket and estimate the amount of water you need.

​

I sprinkled plaster powder into my bucket and watched the surface of the water swallow it. 

​

… 

​

When Matt and I broke up, It was like part of me went underwater. I didn’t deal with it. I was outside of my body. My life was happening around me, to me, and I was watching it like a ghost. It was like I had evicted myself, and I had decided that what I felt was not only too heavy, but also too ugly. Too wet and sniveling and messy. So I took that part of myself- perhaps the most real part of myself- and I put it on silent. I wanted her to go to sleep so I could function and do work.

​

A mold begins with a positive form.

​

Putting my brain in a deep freezer sort of worked for a while, but in a lot of ways it really really didn’t. My grief broke through in arbitrary pockets. I would be fine, sleeping, eating-- and the pain that I felt would come roaring back in. In my waking life, I was pushing my hurt far under the surface, into a dark upside down where it replicated, pulsating, into a squirming amorphous mass that I could feel like bile in the back of my throat.

​

The mold is a negative. Its purpose is to replicate the positive form en masse. It becomes, in some ways, more important than the positive itself. 

​

Matt began, occasionally, to make stressful appearances in my dreams. They were lurid and alarming. In one I launched a glass jar at his head; it smashed into sparkling shards against the doorframe he was standing near. He turned from me and disappeared.