Your email has been registered. Thank you.

Materials and Sculptures

Materials and Sculptures

Here you can know more about what materials Quinta dos Vales's sculptures are made from.

The sculptures are hewn from a variety of materials using various techniques. Some are sculpted from Portuguese marble from Estremoz, while others are shaped from stones found in our very own fields, which consist of sedimentary limestone and include generous amounts of sea life fossils.

A small number of sculptures are carved from wood, cast in bronze or made from ceramics.

However most of the larger sculptures are sculpted in polystyrene and molded in fiberglass and polyester resin. At a first glance this combination might raise eyebrows. Why choose artificial materials if all the traditional ones like stone, wood or metal are readily available?

The answer lies in the design, dimension and the purpose of the sculptures. Some can simply not be executed in stone due to the fragility of the design, others would require an immense time and teamwork to complete, if executed in the traditional way and last but not least because of logistic reasons. Most sculptures are designed for cost effective travelling exhibitions. 20 sculptures 100 kg each instead of 1.500 kg per piece make a real difference!

In any case they all begin with the same process, the story book which will help to transform an abstract idea into a concrete sculpture. From the idea to the final sculpture is a long way and by far not only manual artistic work. A lot of sculptures of a bigger size require substantial technical planning and skills and will give after the second planning stage an idea which materials can not be used.  For the final choice of material several things need then to be taken into consideration: where the sculpture is going to be exhibited, how often it will be moved, budgets available and obviously the architecture of the art piece itself. In easy words, it is actually not the artist, which decides about the material but the sculpture which is to be executed and all the resulting restrictions.

Contact us now!