[PW] Re: Esoteric Name

[John P. Dyson]

Quoting Kay Lancaster <kay at fern.com>:

> On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, david meadows wrote:
>
>> There's no formal name; a guy named fiorelli did the first ones a century
>> ago (using plaster) and in the 1980s they tried doing it with epoxy resin.
>> The cast itself is usually referred to as a 'cast'
>>
>> dm
>
> Mumble years ago, one of my physical anthropology profs always
> termed these "positive casts" -- but he was a man given to very
> precise speech.  The ash was the "mold".
>
> If these were considered classical fossils, like fossil fish in
> limestone, the shapes in the ash bed would be called "impression
> fossils" or molds.  If you fill an impression with material like
> plaster, the resulting plaster is a "positive cast" (it looks
> like the thing that made the impression).  If you think of biting
> into a piece of wax, you'll get a mold or impression of your
> teeth.  Fill the holes in the wax with plaster, and the plaster
> forms a positive cast of your teeth. Take those plaster teeth and
> press them into clay, and you'll have a negative cast of your
> teeth, just like the initial wax mold you made.


To add another notion to Kay's above, one might consider this an 
intaglio, sunken-relief or hollow-relief cast. This is the opposite of 
a bas-relief or alto-relievo technique in sculpture.

John Dyson
Spanish and Portuguese
Indiana University