Thursday, November 22, 2007 YOURHUB
UP CLOSE AND CREATIVE

PREGNANCY MAKES A LASTING IMPRESSION

Colorado Springs artist makes casts of women's bellies as a one-of-a-kind keepsake

By ANDREA BROWN
THE GAZETTE

JERILEE BENNETT, THE GAZETTE While Amanda Pearce was pregnant with her daughter, Jayden, she had a cast made of her belly. The cast has become a work of art that hangs in her home. "It makes me very nostalgic," the 26-year-old mother said of the cast.

Your waistline goes from 24 to 50 inches.  And you want a mold of that preserved as a pregnancy keepsake?

Amanda Pearce did.

A revealing cast of Pearce's convex torso at 37 weeks protrudes from a bedroom wall of her Colorado Springs bungalow. It's a fond memory of being 45 pounds heavier while carrying her daughter, Jayden.

"I look at her and I look at the cast and I'm like, 'Wow,"' said Pearce, 26. "It makes me very nostalgic."

Jayden, 14 months, likes to touch, ogle and kiss the cast that shaped her heritage before entering the world.

Belly-casting options abound from $40 do-it-yourself plaster kits widely available on the Internet to high-end artforms, like on Pearce's wall.

Pearce's oxidized copper belly cast is the handiwork of Colorado Springs artist and doula Keith Roberts. A trio of Roberts' casts at three stages of Pearce's pregnancy is on display at the west-side studio he shares with his wife, Jane, for this weekend's annual Pikes Peak Artists' Studio Tour and Sale. Another belly cast he made hangs in a Santa Fe, N.M., art gallery.

For expectant moms, Rob­erts charges $490 for a final copper-and-plaster 8-pound cast that takes 30 minutes of maternal modeling.

Pearce said it was fun. Fun?

Naked, she stood against a backboard, an arm suspended overhead in a sling.

She held the pose while lathered with alginate, then layered with cheesecloth, diluted plaster and fiberglass chards.

"When you first start it's cold, like you're slapping on pudding or something," she said.

"When it starts hardening you feel it get tighter on your body, then when they're pulling it off it feels like they are taking part of your skin off. It doesn't hurt."

Roberts then works about 14 hours over several weeks to complete the detailed cast.

Roberts also offers a basic white $70 gauze-and-plaster cast done in his studio. In that 90-minute process, the nude woman is coated in Vaseline and gauze-wrapped, much like when a broken limb is fitted for a cast. She takes the ready-made product home with her.

"People can paint them, put clothes on them, make a collage with baby pictures," he said. "One was painted like a globe."

These are hung on the wall or can be used as bowls or whatever.

The belly-casting trend tends to baffle members of older generations, such as Pearce's mom, Lucille Abeyta.

"I'd never heard of it," Abeyta said. "I thought it was interesting."

Abeyta likes the outcome, though she isn't so sure she'd have been game if it had been offered in her childbearing era.

Pearce plans to do it again if she has another baby.

"There's almost nothing better to freeze-frame a moment in your pregnancy," Pearce said. "It's like when you bronze your baby's first pair of shoes; it's that memory you can hold on to and pass on."

Roberts sees a belly cast as a natural relic.

"There is a certain fascination with pregnancy," Roberts said.

"Women complain [when] people touch their tummy, these tummies you can rub."

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0253 or
andrea.brown@gazette.com