Brele Scholz' piglets in the Aula Carolina arts centre in Aachen in summer 2023.

Inspirations

Art installation of cast concrete

Artist Brele Scholz used MC’s Emcekrete casting concrete for a new art project, an installation comprised of 88 piglets.

Artist creates 88 piglet sculptures

Jul 01, 2024

Aachen-based artist Brele Scholz proves time and again that art and construction chemicals can indeed be bed-mates. While she has experimented with resins in the past, she recently used MC’s Emcekrete casting concrete for a new art project, an installation comprised of 88 piglets.

Brele Scholz (65) pursuing her art in her Aachen studio.
© Brele Scholz 2023

The history shared between Brele Scholz and MC-Bauchemie goes back more than a decade. She exhibited her European Heads, larger-than-life wooden sculptures, for the first time at a major international concrete symposium organised by MC in October 2012, which focused on the theme of Europe. She then remodelled these in 2014 using a casting resin from the MC-DUR product family.

She was looking for a new, modern and artificial material that could be used with wood but contrasted with that natural material. Thus she discovered MC casting resin and utilised the material’s complexity with her innate and accomplished creativity.

Artist casts 88 piglet sculptures with Emcekrete 60 A

She utilised the advantages of MC’s Emcekrete 60 A casting concrete for one of her new sculptural installations, entitled ‘The sow of current times with 88 piglets’. The ready-to-use casting concrete is a particularly versatile construction product and is used for chocking precision machinery, machine foundations, bridge supports, crane rails, turbines, etc. It simply needs to be mixed with water and is characterised by very good flow properties, as well as high early and final strengths – making it also ideal for the artistic use of Brele Scholz, who experimented with it and ultimately cast 88 piglets. “The grouting concrete from MC was easy to work with and left beautiful, low-porosity surfaces. It also helped me to produce this many piglets quickly,” says the artist happily. She then combined them with a wooden sow to draw attention to the plight of livestock in factory farming.

The project as outlined shows once again that art and construction chemistry are not a contradiction in terms. Due to its versatile properties and adaptability, complex and detailed shapes can be realised with cast concrete – including piglets – that would be difficult to achieve with other materials.