Memorial In Progress

The sculpting of the statutes is a time consuming operation. It starts with the construction of an armature, which is nothing more than a collection of 2 x 4s, pipe and chicken wire on which the modeling clay will be placed.

The two types of pieces that the artists created for the Memorial are the stand alone life like pieces and the bar-relief of somewhat flat design type (bar-relief means “low relief” in French).

Once the sculpting is completed, a rubber solution is applied over the clay to form a rubber mold. When that is finished, the rubber mold is removed from the clay and then filled with a wax product. The rubber mold is removed after the wax sets up and the wax figure, which is a “positive” object, is crated and sent to a foundry. The artists used two foundries, one in Oregon, Illinois, and the other in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The foundry dips the wax piece in a ceramic solution, once that hardens, it is placed in an oven and the heat melts the wax away (the lost wax process) and the ceramic mold is now the mold for the bronze material. An inner shell of lining is fabricated so that the bronze material is roughly 3/8 of an inch thick – not a solid piece. Upon finishing, as you could imagine, these pieces are done in sections, causing the artists to piece together the parts, braze them together and make the seams indistinguishable. The same procedure that was done on the “bean” at Millennium Park in Chicago, at a cost of millions.