Tar and Latex

Check this out.  By sculptor Sandrine Pelletier, it's horses made of wool thread dipped in tar and latex, then hung from the ceiling ...

Two thoughts:

First, I'd love to go see this show.  It seems quite wonderful.  Except it's in Geneva.

Second, I'm deeply engaged by the idea of tar and latex as a coating/binding agent for my own purposes with the PeaceWorks Project.  Because there are two major challenges to my current work:

1--getting the materials, site, permissions, etc. from the City of Troy.
2--actually putting the thing together.

This second one is a topic that occupies my mind for a good part of the day.  My current thinking is to bind the guns into a ball using black-pigmented fiberglass resin.  But latex is interesting too. And so is tar.  Which has an almost medieval aspect to it.

I wonder, when you walk into the gallery, if you are immediately confronted with a tar smell?  I also wonder what the durability of tar is.  It works great for roads, obviously.  But sculpture?

And a final point:  I spend all my energy trying to talk Troy into giving me enough weapons to make a PeaceWork.  Which we're currently defining as a three to five foot in diameter abstract ball of guns, bound together by polymer resin.  In one of my recent meetings, somebody asked me how many guns I might need.  I said I couldn't tell until I was actually making the sculpture, but that I thought 50 rifles and 50 handguns would suffice.

But what if that's more than enough, and I find myself with a surplus of medium (by which I mean guns)?  Such a problem a man should have, but still.  Maybe something in latex and tar.