The saint factory: Home of religious sculptures

[rug]

By Michal Solarski
21 hours ago

In the south of Poland, a small Silesian town is home to a unique form of manufacturing that most rarely think about: religious sculptures. For more than 100 years, the Workshop of Sacral Art, founded by Kazimierz Schaefer in 1898, has been producing concrete and plaster statues of saints using traditional methods.

Now 117 years later, the factory is currently run by Schaefer's granddaughter Barbara. More than 250 models of religious figures of differing sizes, including statues of Christ, popes and saints, as well as re-creations of the Christmas nativity scene, are being sold both locally and globally.

At its peak, the factory employed dozens of workers, but now only consists of five individuals. Despite the recent recession and competition caused by an influx of cheap plastic figures made in China, this manufacturing has endured, and the quality and aesthetic value of its creations remain second to none.





http://mashable.com/2015/02/01/the-saint-factory/

http://michalsolarski.com/projects/saint-factory

[cbayer]

1. "Workshop of Sacral Art" made me laugh.

Sacral has a much different meaning from a biology perspective.

[rug]

2. It would have an entirely different meaning if only the first syllable was used.

[cbayer]

3. I wonder if you can have a sacral sacrum?

[3catwoman3]

4. It surely...

...does.

I always have a similar reaction to the current popular foodie adjective "artisanal". It's hard to shake one's anatomic orientation when you have a health care career.

Can we re-name Uranus while we are at it? Sounds bad no matter which syllable you emphasize.

[cbayer]

5. If we rename Uranus, what will adolescent boys find to laugh at in astronomy?

When I was working in an inner city public hospital, some of the names people would give their children were hilarious. They did not recognize them as clinical terms though they had likely seen them in that context. It was during a period when people were making up unique names for their kids, which seems to have passed.

I didn't get "artisanal" until I typed it out.

[rug]

6. A votre service.

Accretion Disk

Coronal Hole

Ejecta Blanket

Greatest Elongation

Galactic Bulge

Globular Cluster

Large Hadron Collider

Virgo Cluster

Granted, it may be limited to breaks from AP Physics.

[cbayer]

7. OMG! I guess one had to be an adolescent boy at one time to come up with this list!