A final coat, a sealant, will be required in all the materials that I use and this has allowed me to accept a wider range of substrate materials to work with for my fresco binder in making these framed brick pieces. I have switched to a pre-mixed gypsum based plaster that has an acrylic polymer and micro-fibers already in the dry powder. This Tufstone may be the perfect medium for me, literally.
I have also stopped worrying about the thickness of the substrate as a way to make something durable. Every time I mix in different materials to strengthen a piece, as with back filling a frame with FGR 95 or Forgon MG I create new problems. I end up with leeching white stains on the front of the pieces once they are exposed to water without a sealant. Thus the rationale for the sealant as mentioned above, although I have not sealed the items from the back too, and I have been warned that if there is no way for moisture to escape then that in and of itself can cause problems. In the end it seems that different materials layered onto each other eventually crack or leech color and therefore I can't just use mass as a sealant and increased mass is not a requirement for a finished piece.
Weight has always been a factor in my product development, so by reducing mass I am reducing weight, which is a good thing. I even converted some of my mess-ups to stickers and gave them to my kids so that they could have some fun putting them up in places. Instinctually they started drawing on the brick stickers with random slogans and sticking them in places, so I am happy to say that I continue to see no bounds with this project. I am using a pressure sensitive adhesive on the back of the thinly casted pieces, and when I say thin, I mean thin. I can't imagine any piece of ceramic being able to be used in this way. As a result I am confident that I have found a way to argue that these gypsum based products are more applicable than ceramic for my use. I have heard that ceramic technology is in use in many things we use in our day-to-day lives, like even printed pages in magazines may be coated with a sort of ceramic matrix, but I don't really know this to be true. So when I refer to ceramics I am referencing the typical crafted ceramics that are used with glazed images and designs. Boring, but long lasting in that they are crystaline and rock-like in there atomic form.
Half a student I was and indeed I only learned half the information; just enough information to be dangerous to myself and others, so watch out. Historical Geology, Archeology, and Mineralogy taught me a few things about the archival nature of our world. Unless something has a solid internal structure it won't really survive because the compounds that make up our world are easily subjected to immediate decay. Without serious efforts being made to preserve an item over an extended period of time it won't be around to convey information and since our relative time in existence is miniscule as compared to the geological record it is a crap shoot to wonder what will last thousands of years.
Our skulls will be more important, historically speaking, in the long run versus our art since it may be preserved for a longer period of time as a result of the calcium bone structure than our art. But our art will contain information beyond what our physical body can preserve as to the relevance of our existence. There will be millions of skulls left in the soil for future generations to examine, but for every unique piece of art that is created during any specific period of time, there need be only one. Each unique piece of work contains information beyond our understanding that is outside of even itself, as far as the relevance to our times, so the more unique an item is the more important it could be from a historical perspective.
Bonding my frames to the simulated brick walls is still an issue and the frames are serving dual purposes now. The frame is in essence the strongest part of the pieces I am making since the veneer of brick has become so thin. Some of my current pieces have just crumbled when I release them from thier mold. I think this is the result of too much pigment in the binder and the powdered and liquid silica work against the internal strength of the fresco material I am using to make the frames and brick. This repeats the theme of sealant, since the more color I add to the fresco dilutes the strength I have started making the frames without color and painted them with an airbrush later. This should provide a stronger frame with better bonding characteristics than heavily pigmented plasters.
Finally I have accepted that I will need to use polyester resin or epoxy as a bonding layer to firmly adhere the frame to the brick wall because I can't come up with anything better, other than pouring both pieces at the same time and this reduces the flexibility of the textures that I can create using the fresco material. The entire point of the fresco is the textural quality of the finished work, and if I use a mold for the frame simultaneously with casting the brick wall I lose a significant amount of the texture that makes a brick wall brick. I have testing using the photo-fresco techniques to create the brick as a photograph in the plaster, but without the texture it fails to work for me. Other image based things work well as the photo-fresco, but not le brick.
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