It begins with a clay model of the sculpture — the original form from which everything else is made. A mold is then created around the clay piece. Once the mold is opened, the clay model is removed, leaving behind a hollow negative of the sculpture.
Hot wax is poured into the mold to create a wax replica, which is then repeatedly dipped into a ceramic slurry to build a hard shell. The shell, with the wax still inside, is placed in a kiln, where the wax melts away. Molten bronze is then poured into the heated shell. After the bronze cools, the ceramic shell is broken away, the metal is cleaned and finished, and the sculpture is patinated. Finally, the piece is coated in wax to help preserve its finish.
This is the bronze-casting process, a long and arduous journey, as explained by sculptor Susan Read Cronin, whose newest exhibit, Play: Bronze Sculptures and Other Stuff, on view August 13-November 29 at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, includes a brief explanation of the technique alongside a carefully curated selection of her bronze works.
Fittingly titled Play, the exhibition brings together whimsical, thought-provoking bronze sculptures, poems, and mixed-media works, all rooted in Cronin’s belief that play means reconnecting with one’s childlike self, free from the obligations and routines of adulthood. Through her sculptures, she hopes to offer something radically simple: permission to play.
“Play is a big part of my world,” she shared. “My feeling is that there should be more play in the world.”
One of the most distinctive groupings on display is Cronin’s “Ooffs”— a series of bronze “book collection” eggs whose very name is a pun on the French word œuf (egg). Each egg is mounted in a shadow box, complete with mock‑museum labels describing their imagined “habitat” and “call,” as if they were rare birds in a natural history gallery. Their names are as playful as their forms: “The gorgeous reticulated fish eater,” “The great northern matrix,” “The detached sickle‑beaked hornberry pie eater,” and so on.
Nearby, a cluster of bronze ladders explores Cronin’s love of negative space. The ladders, which started out tiny and grew to her exact height in later pieces, play with scale and absence as much as with form.
“I love negative space,” she said. “Ladders and springs have this space in them. I love to see what doesn’t exist as well as what does.”
Some sculptures extend that sense of narrative and mischief. A work titled “I Will Be a Good Bear” features a bear in a dunce cap, paired with a chalkboard densely filled with the line “I will be a good bear” written over and over, like a visual joke about discipline and misbehavior. The bear sits on a turntable so viewers — or perhaps an imaginary teacher — can rotate him “into the corner” or back out again.
Before she became known for her imaginative bronze sculptures, Cronin ran a mail order business creating animal play suits for children — cats, mice, pandas, penguins, rabbits — designed not as one‑off costumes, but as everyday outfits kids could live and play in.
When she sold that business and turned to clay modeling and sculpture in the early 1990s, she realized she hadn’t really left that world behind.
“I realized I was still working with cat, mouse, panda — different animals — but now they were frozen in time rather than in soft velour,” she explained. “These scenes just kept emerging.”
For Cronin, play is not limited to objects. During the pandemic, she began taking her lifelong habit of writing poetry more seriously, eventually publishing three books of her poems, several of which are woven directly into the exhibit.
The poems are not solemn meditations, but witty, language‑driven pieces that mirror the humor in her sculptures. One poem, “Left,” is a looping tongue‑twister about noses on the left and right, and the confusion that ensues when one “leaves.”
Cronin hopes visitors leave the exhibit having “thought about something in a different way,” she said, “or they’ve just engaged in a way that maybe they hadn’t done in a long time.”
Play: Bronze Sculptures and Other Stuff by Susan Read Cronin will be on view from August 13-November 29 at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, 113 Harbor Way. The exhibit is included with museum admission (free for SBMM members). For more information, see sbmm.org.
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