It is really incredibly light, and not at all that fragile.

This sculpture is the last I finished for the Temporary Art Repair Shop in Edinburgh. Not because it was hard to come up with an idea. It was clear to me immediately when Gordon Munro came in with this little broken RC helicopter what I wanted to do with it. Rather it was getting the right materials, making the mould, letting it set (and air out a bit, since polyester always stinks so terribly for a few days after casting) that took time. It was mainly the dark front cockpit of the toy copter, and how half translucent the body is, that much more suggested an ancient dragonfly than a high tech toy vehicle.

Will people in the future find plastic toys stuck in real amber, or will we have cut down all the trees long before making that impossible?

I was happy that the idea I got for this object can be seen as reflecting on aspects of sculpture, historically and now, as I had several good conversations with Gordon about sculpture and how it is taught and presented. Is Ancient Future a classical or a modernist sculpture, is it a pun or a fake, is it a ready-made or a fiction? I was also happy with how bits of plaster from the mould which got stuck in the polyester resin ended up looking like the chalk deposits you can often find on raw pieces of amber or flint.

A chunk of amber this big would be worth a lot of money, even without a toy helicopter within it.

I wonder how long this piece of fake amber will survive. Polyester resin is itself pretty hard stuff, of course not as hard as stone, but amber itself started as soft resin that slowly petrified during millions of years under the ground. Will the lump I made eventually end up under ground, were it will get further compressed and chemically transformed into some kind of super amber, or will the resin slowly grind down and dissolve into the huge polymer sludge we are leaving for our grandchildren’s generations? Maybe the polymer sludge itself will slowly change and transform over coming millennia, into new layers and deposits of oil and chemicals.

You can just about see what is hiding inside, but you could also easily imagine it being a huge insect.

Object no. 28