(lighthearted music) (rotocasting machine whirring) - My name is Scott Foster.

I'm a Sculptor.

I make things.

I'm the guy who gets in trouble at the museums for touching everything (chuckles).

So it's like, "Ooh, I need to touch that."

I'm a very tactile person.

A painting or a drawing is an illusion of depth, an illusion of something in the real world where sculpture is something in the real world.

Soon after college, I was back in Minneapolis, I started working in commercials doing special effects and props and stuff.

I wanted to go to the left coast and felt like the art was a little bit more accessible here and there were still the Old Guard in Minneapolis and it seemed like all the galleries were still pretty conservative and that wasn't the direction I wanted to go with my art.

And so came out here to keep my pursuit of sculpting going.

♪ PJs ♪ - I started working sculpting characters for Will Vinton for "PJs".

And then from the "PJs", they had another TV show called "Gary and Mike" that I was the lead sculptor on.

And in between the two, there's a bunch of commercials that I sculpted characters for.

- [Narrator] Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles rocks your whole mouth.

- It's kind of a crash course in stop motion animation, puppet building.

(mid tempo music) (dog panting) I also worked for Laika on "Coraline, I got to work on Forcible, and the young Forcible and Spink, and mouse and bunch of side characters and stuff like that.

"The Boxtrolls", that was really fun.

I think I did all the red hats, bodies, and yeah, just a bunch of characters for "The Boxtrolls", that was a fun project.

My personal work comes to me usually out of the need to make something.

When I get an idea for a piece, so I'll do a quick sketch of it.

I'll then think about the materials I wanna make it in and go from there, and then make a mold of it and cast it.

(rotocasting machine whirring) This is a rotocasting machine.

It will tumble your mold.

So this works with gravity pulling the resin around and around and around.

So as it's spinning around, it's coating the whole inside of the mold.

To me, it's a process.

I'm a very process oriented person.

I like setting up my own problems and then solving them.

My first casting didn't go so well (chuckles).

And then I got a face, that was better.

And I got this out of it, some of the body, but it wasn't getting in the back of the head at all.

So then I did this one and I tried to do it with less resin and it wasn't enough.

And so I just got this thin skin and a weird lump on the back of the head.

So the difference between doing commercial work versus your own personal work, in the commercial works, you are given an assignment and you have to work within the parameters of what is expected.

So you don't always have the freedom to do exactly what you wanna do.

There she is.

I think I can use that.

It's an assignment.

It's kinda like school.

And then my personal works, I have the freedom to do whatever I want, however I want.

In the commercial work, I usually am not too surprised when they ask for something ridiculous.

I'm usually surprised that they want it tomorrow.

I'm still like, "You can't do that overnight."

In my own work, you never know what's around the bend, where your brain's gonna go, what you're gonna find.

When you start exploring a new material or a new concept for sculpture, the process reveals itself as you go.

The Watchers were originally conceived back in '93 I think.

I was fresh outta school and had my first studio, and was sculpting away and it just kind of came out of the blue, and I've lived with the design since.

To me, they kind of represent kind of the arrogance of humanity.

(machine whirring) Their long necks are striving to look up and kind of looking down their nose at the rest of the world.

But then they're thin and emaciated and falling apart.

So they'll sit there and watch the world die without lifting a finger.

It just seems like I had to revisit that for nowadays 'cause back when I originally made 'em, I thought maybe the world would change, humanity would change and change the world, but instead they just careen down the same path.

(chickens clucking) Hey, chickens.

So it was early in the pandemic, wasn't really looking to move, and then I found this property.

And then all of a sudden, it got really real really fast.

And I never really realized that I had been talking about moving to the country for 20 years.

Never thought of it.

I always lived right on Mississippi.

It was centrally located, all the shops and everything, all the fun stuff.

And so when I found this property and it was available, I kind of pounced.

It was all of a sudden like that's where I need to go.

(upbeat music) Well, being a sculptor, you need a lot of space to make things.

I would never have built that Watcher back at my Mississippi studio.

I know if I'm stuck on a project and getting frustrated or not feeling the flow, I'll just step out and walk around the property.

It's definitely soothing.

I like having a project, I like having a creative outlet.

And when you have 10 acres, you always have a project.

I think in this area, we'll probably get a clearing for a sculpture.

Right now, we're still just battling all the black berries and trying to see what is here.

It's been really good to be able to just knuckle down and work.

When the sun goes down, it's dark.

There's no one around, it's magic time.

(upbeat music) I hope people, when they see my work, I hope it brings them joy and maybe a little sense of awe, a little bit of sense of magic.

I hope it moves them in some way.

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