Master sauce
The master sauce (or Lou mei) is a form of braising stock used in Chinese cuisine. It is often re-used, adding new spices and ingredients as you go.
Some Chinese stocks or master sauces are rumored to have been in continual use for years, increasing in depth and flavour with each use.
I make use of the same technique within the workshop. There is always a stock pot of some description - usually a bucket or plastic storage bin - into which broken stones or chippings left over from carving get thrown. I often throw the debris swept up from the studio floor into this stock pot along with all concrete and glass trimmings, flashings and offcuts. These get thrown into the pot and eventually mixed into a concrete sculpture of some description. Often these sculptures are then trimmed and cut to enhance the shape or remove material that is not required. The leftovers from the new sculpture are then put back into the stock pot and mixed with new aggregates. In this way my sculptures literally contain a trace of previous works.
Clastic work flow
clastic 1. (Geological Science) (of sedimentary rock, etc) composed of fragments of pre existing rock that have been transported some distance from their points of origin.
The stock pot method of gathering materials for concrete sculpture is augmented with the addition of waste and spare materials left from some of the larger public and private works I have produced I collect and store scrap or spare materials from larger artworks resulting from bulk orders of pigments or sand etc. I collect blocks, bricks, stone and scraps from stone yards. These eventually get mixed in or used in sculptural collages such as “The Moria (three fates)”.
The three bases of these sculptures are the offcuts from uplighters that were placed on the inside of large granite Tree tubs. Other parts of the three fates sculptures came from a stone yard in Scotland and were the offcuts from the making of stone seats and bollards. The threads of life in the set are reinforcement steel that was discarded by a site concrete crushing plant.
Some of the aggregates, stone or concrete waste may have been on the shelf for 20 years before being mixed back into the latest sculpture. I will often produce a set of sculptures using up these store cupboard ingredients: the Black and Jack Series uses white concrete bricks from the registry office in Blackpool, spare red quartz concrete from the Road to the Isles in Auchterarder, and blue concrete samples with black Sikaflex from the Comedy Carpet.