Gilded Cob

The most common harvest, counted grain by grain.

Modeled from a single ear of corn and scaled until the ordinary turned ceremonial. Colour was introduced last, once the form had been resolved entirely in metal.

The only work in the collection cast in bronze rather than steel. Gold needs a warm metal beneath it to read as gold and not as paint.

The ear is modelled grain by grain and cast by lost wax in three sections. Every grain is then trued by hand — the pour leaves them uneven, and on a form built entirely from repetition the eye finds the one grain that sits wrong before it finds anything else.

The gilding is done in water, the old way: sized, laid with bole, leafed by hand, then burnished with an agate stone until it takes its own light. Leaf cannot be stretched across a field of curves without tearing, so the grains are covered and burnished one at a time. Burnishing cannot be undone. It is the one step where a mistake costs the whole example.

The coloured grains are set last, one at a time, in cold enamel. Their number is fixed. Their arrangement is not — the artist decides the pattern for each example at the bench, so no two ears in the edition are counted the same way.