PEOPLE | CULTURE | HAPPENINGS | TRENDS beachbites From Wax to Bronze Lost & Found BY MARIMAR McNAUGHTON PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALLISON POTTER In its raw state, a wax brick looks like a two-to-three pound block of brown chocolate. Justin Campbell uses nine or ten chunks of wax — between 18 and 20 pounds — to sculpt the body and tentacles of what will eventually become a bronze octopus weighing roughly three times that amount. Start to finish the bronze casting pro-cess could take a month to complete. It begins inside Campbell’s home studio in Wilmington and ends in an atypical warehouse foundry off Oleander Drive. Campbell has been casting bronze since earning a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Sculpture from East Carolina University in 2009 . While other bronze sculptors may form their initial molds from clay, Campbell prefers the lost wax technique. After the bronze cools, Campbell chisels the shell off of the metal and cuts through the sprue systems (the passages through which the metal travels to inject into the molds) before welding the ten pieces into an octopus. 15 www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
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