Serious Play with
PRECIOUS METAL CLAY
by Tim McCreight and Patricia Daunis-Dunning

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Imagine a material that looks, feels and molds like children’s modeling clay. And imagine that objects made in that material could be magically transformed into precious metal by a simple firing. That’s the gist of a revolutionary new substance called Precious Metal Clay (PMC) recently developed by Mitsubishi Materials Corporation of Japan. The material is currently available in Japan and Europe and is about to make its commercial debut in the United States. The first step in launching it in this country was an intensive workshop for 15 designers who were asked to experiment with PMC to determine its potential. What follows is an informal report of that workshop, which took place at the end of May, 1995.

The format of the workshop brought a group together for four and a half days, and provided enough PMC to allow for experimentation at no cost to the participants. The remote Haystack campus on the coast of Maine was selected because its isolated location would allow for uninterrupted focus. The designers were joined by an American scientific consultant and two representatives of the manufacturing and marketing divisions in Japan.

Going into the seminar we knew only this much: the material was radically different from anything we’d worked with before, and the wealth of information that had been amassed so far came from the scientists who developed the peculiar stuff in the first place. We were provided with pages of technical information that described shrinkage, density, and malleability in great detail, but raised more questions than it answered about its artistic possibilities. We were interested in discovering how PMC behaved in the hands of people who approached any material with a mix of skepticism and delight.

Tim writes:

As the time of the workshop drew near I became increasingly nervous about working alongside my mentors and heroes. I could understand why everybody else on the list had been selected, but why me? I looked forward with enthusiasm to being with these talented people, but was worried about not keeping up with their high voltage talent. As it turned out, this was expressed over the next few days by several people.

Patty remembers:

I kept asking Tim before that eventful week, “What’s this Precious Metal Clay like? What should I bring to work with? How did it work? Who would be my roommate?” “It’s clay. Bring anything you want to work with. It’s clay. I don’t know,” were his replies. With these parameters, I hopped in my car and drove the three hours it took to get to Haystack. My roommate turned out to be Micki Lippe, a fellow exhibitor at the ACE Shows.

On the first morning we were each given a dozen small plastic boxes marked Fine Silver Clay. Inside the box was a soft lump of pale white clay neatly tucked up in plastic wrap. I was hesitant to begin, and cut off a small portion, hoping I wouldn’t embarrass myself too badly. I started by rolling a ball of the clay into a pancake that I then cut into strips and assembled into a small cylinder. If anybody asked I could say it was a small beaker, though I had only the roughest idea of what would actually be the result. The mood in the studio was expectant and casual. In hindsight, perhaps I wasn’t the only one putting up a facade of confidence as we started.

Monday morning we moved into the studio – some people came prepared with their “workshop gear” which made me realize how out of it I had become, not having taught at Haystack in over 15 years and working exclusively for the “marketplace.” I unpacked my working tools, some plastic doll parts and my six-year-old son’s “Play-Doh Fun Factory.” (Somehow I managed to leave my pliers, files, and saw at home.) We were each given 10 boxes of the mystery clay; lovely packages the size of a cigarette pack, with a 100 gram lump of clay neatly double wrapped inside. So Japanese! My first thought was that this wouldn’t last even the first day – let alone the next four! “Well,” I said to myself, “let’s open it up and see…” It’s clay – regular, grayish white, squishy like a mix of plastecine and potter’s clay. (This description is from a person who took one pottery class 20 years ago, so it might be technically vague.) I figured I’d quickly whip up some shapes and fire them in the kiln to see just exactly how this metamorphosis occurred.

We were given a tool kit that included a small sheet of plastic, a plastic rolling tube, and some cotton pads moistened with olive oil for lubricant. I rolled out some clay, which seemed to be just like other clay I’ve used. I cut it into strips with my X-Acto blade (actually Fred Woell’s X-Acto blade) and worked the strips into a square grid about four inches on a side. After partially drying the clay with a hairdryer I experimented with a ceramics tool to make serrated textures in the clay. “Oh, what about weaving wire into the strips cut from the serrated textured clay?” I wondered. Using fine silver I now wove the clay through the silver wire. “What about copper wire, I thought, what about...” and so the morning went and it was fun. I think everyone was trying to determine the properties that distinguished this material from others. I was intent on finding the characteristics that would allow me to make forms that could not be made in conventional materials. Lunch break.

I tried to use an adhesives syringe, but I didn’t have strength enough to force the PMC through the syringe. I diluted it with water but had trouble achieving a smooth consistency. The thin paste went through the tube all right until it got blocked with a lump… and splat! An ugly blob. Back to the drawing board.

Mr. Hirasawa, who would later suggest that we call him by his first name, Juichi, fired the early work in what he called the Quick Fire Process, in which the lightly dried objects (we used a hair dryer) were placed into a hot kiln for about 15 minutes. We had been told that a proper firing took a couple hours, so this was a welcome surprise. I resolved that 15 minutes would be enough for me. As the objects came out of the kiln they could be quenched and handled immediately. My response was mixed. On the one hand, it was exciting that this fragile clay-like object of only a few minutes ago was now a solid piece of fine silver. At the same time, it was a fragile white piece of fine silver that had not improved on the object I made. Just like in carving a wax model, the problem is you get exactly what you put in and nothing more. In this case it was less, at least in terms of size. My “beaker” had shrunk to a large thimble. This wasn’t a crisis, since there was no size requirement for the piece in the first place but it was a new experience to have my work reduce in size. Early conversations around the studio revealed that this was a shock to most of us. It wasn’t, I think, that shrinkage was such a tremendous barrier, but it was the most dramatic phenomenon and the easiest to talk about.

Our first batch of fired pieces came out of the kiln – exactly as we formed them only in miniature and with a frosted white surface that resembled sandblasting. The works were lighter in weight, and so small! My 4” square had shrunk by about half but the proportions were the same. It reminded me of using the reducer button on the photocopy machine. We had a few minutes before dinner to brass brush finish some of the pieces and once they had a bit of a sheen I felt more hopeful.

The first day started with a carefully prepared introduction to the material from the two Japanese representatives. Each morning thereafter we had another brief demonstration to introduce us to further information about PMC.

It was fascinating to watch the familiar aesthetics of my colleagues reappear in the new guise of PMC. Someone familiar with J. Fred Woell’s work would quickly recognize his touch in the beads with text borrowed from commercial sources. John Paul Miller’s forms used a familiar vocabulary that harkened back to the important pieces he has made based on marine creatures. Partly this was the logical response to the need to come up with ideas quickly, but I wonder if it doesn’t say something as well about the intrinsic sympathy between makers and particular iconic elements.

There seemed to be waves of frustration that swept through the studio. I was frustrated with the brittleness and lack of malleability of the quick-fired pieces. As I realized this I became aware of other people coming to the same frustration. This was a pattern that rippled through the workshop all week, fortunately involving as much positive response as negative. As someone said, we each rode the same roller coaster. We reached the highs and lows at different times, but we weren’t far behind each other. One of my lows hit late in the second day when I felt I was using the PMC in obvious ways to create objects that could be made in metal. I was frustrated by the softness of the material and yearned for the way metal offers resistance to a hammer or chisel. Somehow as I worked my fingers turned into thumbs.

Now the days are a blur of demonstrations, working, excitement, and frustration, working, excitement, working, frustration. It was my sense that we all felt the ups and downs at more or less the same time. It was truly an amazing group to be with: there were no disagreements or “over done” egos. Everyone seemed comfortable with themselves and their work, period. It was extraordinary that this group of 15 people who are movers in their own worlds could mix so well together.

For a while I was concerned that the Japanese representatives from Mitsubishi felt that this was one big mistake, a gut feeling that was confirmed when other participants expressed the same fear. I was worried that the American creative process might be so different than the Asian approach that our sincere efforts might seem inappropriate to the Japanese. I made a comparison between our exploratory creative process and raising a child. You have this wonderful infant for whom all things are possible, then he hits two years old and you wonder what went wrong, then he becomes a sweet child until adolescence when the kid is awkward, ungainly and unpleasant. But if you stick with it a wonderful person will emerge, maybe not exactly what you expected, but even better! That’s how I see the creative process, and by Wednesday we were deep into those charming teens. It was tough – particularly because we metalsmiths were used to having a tool between us and the material.

Whatever small frustration I felt was overshadowed by the pleasure of working in this room with 14 respected colleagues. I sat at a table with John Paul Miller, Chris Ramsay, Eleanor Moty and John Marshall. Are you jealous? Not only are they kind, interesting, talented people, but we were engaged in a pursuit that was equally new to all of us. It would be difficult to imagine another situation in which a group of this diversity could meet on a level playing field like the one we found in PMC. Though we represented careers that varied in length from 2 to over 40 years, this material was equally new to each of us. Equally new, frustrating and intriguing.

I can’t be certain, but I don’t think there was a single moment when the studio was quiet. Sometimes conversations stayed between benchmates, and often revolved around getting caught up on each other’s activities. But then there were the jokes that were broadcast across the room and the sharing of our discoveries and frustrations. Throughout it all, Matsu and Juichi were kept busy firing the seven kilns that lined the room. I learned later that they expected to have one firing a day, maybe two toward the end. We had them working through 3 firings, then took over ourselves for another at night.

Precious Metal Clay is available in sheets, developed specifically for origami. These thin sheets had a slightly different consistency and resembled rubber. They could be cut with scissors and folded just like a stiff paper. The firing process left this material particularly thin and fragile, enough that my original enthusiasm was blunted. This would take a little more experimentation to get used to.

When I tried polishing some finished pieces the metal seemed to clog with compound and looked wretched. Burnishing proved a more successful way to bring up a high polish. Oxidation took nicely and offered a good contrast to the whiteness of the fine silver.

“Hollowware will become an obsolete technique” – not true of course, but it’s possible to make a pinch pot, or wrap the clay around a Dixie cup, or throw it on a wheel, then sinter it, and voilá, a hollow form! Can you imagine? And you can make it in minutes! Not that all our attempts proved successful. When I tried to cast my PMC slip into a hollow plaster form it adhered to the plaster and never came off, ever after firing in the kiln!

The gold PMC shipped from Japan for our use got held up in customs and it looked for a while like it wouldn’t arrive in time. After dinner on our last evening we got a call that it was delivered to my house, four hours away. An obliging student was hired to bring it up and we found ourselves in an impromptu vigil, Waiting For the Gold. It was after midnight when was received by an exhausted and shopworn crew who immediately set to work. When the fog lifted in the morning there were over twenty objects made in this particularly alluring material, which fires with a rich ochre color and yields a material that is for some reason a lot stronger than conventional 24 karat gold.

Wednesday afternoon we were told just maybe we would get to try the 24 karat gold clay that had gotten hung up in customs because it didn’t fit nicely under any of the import categories. We waited and continued to use our silver clay – I had gone through only 6 boxes and was on my 7th – so much for running through it like water. At dinner Tim announced the gold had cleared customs, arrived at his house at 7:30 , and that one of his students would have it to us by midnight. The last firing was scheduled for 6 :00 AM on Friday. This meant we’d have a couple hours to experiment with the gold, and those hours would fall between 1:00 and 6:00 in the morning. It did arrive and there were quite a few of us left to welcome the courier who brought these small packages that one participant described nicely as “A very expensive Tootsie Roll Junior”. Each box held 25 grams of 24K gold clay, a lump worth around $500.

I immediately went into writer’s block, artist’s block, you name it. It was very expensive, less of it than the silver clay we had used and it was very expensive. I tried some of the familiar techniques I had been working with (very expensive) all week (must be successful!) rolling, making textures, weaving (very expensive) rolling into a ball and starting again. (Must be successful.) Rolling texture – when I heard, “Hey, that looks just great , Patty, why don’t you leave it right there.” This rescue from someone who was not all wrapped up in my anxieties. I finished working at 5:00 that morning; the sun was coming up when I hobbled off for 2 hours of sleep. After breakfast and studio clean up, the gold pieces came out and they were just lovely – so beautiful – a dusty yellow ochre color, just breathtaking. A light brass brushing of the gold brought up all its magnificence.

I entered the workshop feeling fortunate to be part of an historic and, let’s face it, a fun experiment. I came out of it feeling even more fortunate. The bonds with colleagues are irreplaceable. While I don’t think PMC will revolutionize jewelrymaking as we know it, I think it will have a significant impact on our understanding of metalworking. We have a potential now to create metal objects in a way that simply never existed before. It is rare to be a part of such a momentous project, particularly to be there at the early moments.

To some extent this might be used to replace conventional techniques, but it’s really not the same as working in metal. I think of the difference between photocopies and photographs: neither one can replace the other, but each offers potential for creativity. Like the newborn baby full of wonderful newness and potential, we need to rise to the challenge of finding the unique possibilities. Fifteen people with fifteen displays, all with their signature styling, so personal, so wonderful. We are on a threshold here.

I’m intrigued with the material and have continued to work with it in the two months since the workshop. I know I’ve only scratched the surface of its potential and that new applications will be found as more people extend the experiments. It was wonderful to be supported by a major corporation like Mitsubishi who appreciated this gaggle of artists for their unique talents; the ability to bring vision, enthusiasm and a healthy dose of skepticism to their innovation. It was an altogether rare opportunity that I hope will inspire other corporations.

Post Script: A couple days later I was exhibiting at our largest and one of the most important trade shows for jewelry in Las Vegas. That night at dinner I sat in the restaurant in the shadow of clanging slot machines, blinking lights, mobs of people, and remembered being at Haystack. Just days ago I was listening to waves gently brush against the rocks, seeing eagles circling overhead and walking through stands of tall spruce trees on spongy moss as the soft afternoon sun filtered through the needles, working with a very exciting new material that may make major changes in our industry. Imagine!

Workshop Participants:
Sharon Church Kim L. Cridler Patty Daunis-Dunning Pat Flynn Micki Lippe John Marshall
Tim McCreight John Paul Miller Myra Mimlitsch-Gray Eleanor Moty Ron Pearson Jack Prip
Gene Pijanowski Chris Ramsay J. Fred Woel

 

 

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