Word: styrofoam
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...disarranging at least five of his works in process, and after being disturbed at the interview with Mirko by a stray artsy busybody, it's easy to see why Mirko doesn't hold open house. His jungle of massive wood beams from razed houses (works-to-be), metal shears, styrofoam, paints, glues, saws and over 100 sculptures and sculptures-to-be is neither suitable nor navigable for masses of visitors...
EVEN Mirko's telling of how he makes a sculpture could fit any of at least 1000 great and minor artisst today. There is material--styrofoam, bronze, wood, automobile parts, plexiglass, wood. Material tells you what is permissible--bronze cannot be translucent, while plexiglass makes Mirko play with its strange transparency. Uncolored plexiglass does not exist visually, until you cut it. So it is the elimination of material that makes the form, while the bulk makes a void...
...within tradition Mirko is very alive and open to new ways and ideas. When he came here from Italy he discovered styrofoam. He sketches in it--styrofoam is well-suited to sketching because it is easy to cut, join, and texture with just a fingernail or scrap of wood. And he modified the lost-wax casting technique to cast directly from styrofoam, and even egg cartons, to bronze. (In lost-wax casting, one puts a refracting material like plaster around a wax shape one wants to reproduce, melts out the wax once the plaster hardens and then pours in molten...
...advantage of the styrofoam-bronze technique is that it is very easy to texture the surface of the model and transfer this to the bronze...
...firm covered the trails with loose Styrofoam pellets, which the wind blew into the woods. Others have experimented with long, shining strips of polymer plastics, which proved to be too slow and did not allow the ski edges to bite into the material on turns. Still others have developed mats with nylon bristles; they worked well?until the skier fell. Recalls Jack Kurlander, a founder of the Great Gorge ski area in New Jersey: "The bristles were needle-sharp and everybody tore his pants. There was blood, blood, blood. Boy! Were we embarrassed...