Throughout its history, Sculpture Casting Services has crafted bronze sculptures for acclaimed sculptors and artists from around the globe, producing works ranging from small to many metres in size. Their ability to integrate innovation and the latest technologies into their manufacturing processes has allowed them to stand out in the industry locally and internationally.

Some years ago, a merger between Sculpture Casting Services and Bronze Age Art Foundry, along with their move to a much larger gallery facility at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, and then subsequently to a new location at the V&A Waterfront, has brought numerous advantages to the art and bronze foundry.

The expanded space has facilitated the management and assembly of larger sculptures and Sculpture Casting Services’ facilities now include 3D scanning, printing, file modification and archiving, CNC router services, reverse engineering, sculpture enlargement, rapid prototyping, and custom architectural mouldings.

Recently Sculpture Casting Services took on one of their largest and most intricate projects to date, a 350kg, 5m tall casting of a Gold Coast Juniper bonsai tree and its foliage

The famous British artist Marc Quinn produced / commissioned the production and the six-month process included printing and cutting in urethane, the artist’s resurfacing, moulding, casting, engineering assembly and finishing

Recently Sculpture Casting Services took on one of their largest and most intricate projects to date, a 350kg, 5m tall casting of a Gold Coast Juniper bonsai tree and its foliage. The casting was vacuum flask cast in bronze and the whole tree was disassembled to fit inside a 12m container, for export.

The tree was cast using the ceramic investment casting method, employing resin sand moulds and jewellery investment flasks.

The whole project took roughly six months, from the arrival of a digital STL file – a digital file format used to represent the surface geometry of a 3D object – of the scanned original bonsai, a Gold Coast Chinese Juniper.

The famous British artist Marc Quinn produced / commissioned the production and the six-month process included printing and cutting in urethane, the artist’s resurfacing, moulding, casting, engineering assembly and finishing.

Specially engineered cradles were fabricated for its transport to where it was exhibited – Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom, and the piece was titled, ‘Held by Desire, The Dimensions of Freedom (Cloud Garden)’.

The casting was vacuum flask cast in bronze and the whole tree was disassembled to fit inside a 12m container, for export

Specially engineered cradles were fabricated for its transport to where it was exhibited and for the bronze itself

It draws inspiration from the work of Japanese bonsai master Masahiko Kimura and was positioned at the centre of the Octagon in the Temperate House Octagon, surrounded by other bonsai works created by Quinn. Unlike the typical practice of pruning bonsai trees to maintain their small size, Quinn envisioned the bonsai tree liberated to grow back to its natural size, freed from human control and restriction.

“Since a bonsai tree has had its roots pruned and is kept in an unnatural size and shape by continual human interference, it represents the subjugation of nature to our own desire. The sculptures present a frozen moment in time as the trees, held perpetually in a miniature state, would revert back to their natural size if replanted and allowed to grow. The enlarged versions of this sculpture fulfil the tree’s desire by returning to the scale of a full-size adult tree.”

For further details contact Bronze Age: Sculpture Casting Services on TEL: 021 418 0003 or visit www.sculpturecasting.co.za