MOLD MOLD MOLD cursed miniatures, beautiful decay

Mold Mold Mold
Minatures: Nick Borelli
Design: Patrick Crotty
Publisher: Peow2 / $25
June 2025

Mold Mold Mold is an artist’s monograph, compiled from work by a custom miniature maker. A kitbasher and macabre tinkerer in “conversions.” Hobbyist. You should see his workspace. Nick Borelli’s creations are equally overwhelming. Nightmarish, once-human forms, often so mutated they aren’t recognizable as people at all anymore, this one looks similar to a power generator, that one a wall, wasteland denizens more mound than man. Blashphemous minis that are also goofy. Silly despite their inexplicability. Gross and compelling and unique. Each creature tells a story, so suspend your sanity and listen.

Mold Mold Mold is on the line between an artist’s catalog and a creature compendium/role playing game sourcebook. It’s definitely a book of photographs of sculptures. But there’s a sly casualness to the text that catalog monographs rarely get, the figures and labels intermingle instead of being segregated into a document and its accompanying notes. Creatures presented like TSR would. Cleaner: Patrick Crotty’s design aesthetic has a video game HUD, sans-serif precision to it. A retrofuture computer interface to index post-apocalyptic random encounters.

Simon Roy hive rise up. Clive Barker heads take note. Truly a book of Richard Scarry Cenobites. But the art of miniatures is about more than just design. Borelli achieves textures that speak to the character’s story and the creation of the object both. Mold Mold Mold is a book of Things. How the idea is expressed is as important as the idea itself. This doubling down on forcing the viewer to inspect each piece as a static object throws a cornucopia of twisted, vivid details on an already stoked imagination. We create their mannerisms, just as we create the world they occupy; solving the puzzle ourselves of how they move, and towards what, and why.

Bronze.

Look, bronze figures with teal rust is just a compelling color combination, I don’t make the rules. Building up a texture that obscures the metalwork beneath, and then painting it so that the growth is indistinguishable from the chemical reaction of oxidization when it’s a nerd playing with various bonding mediums and wiping methods. These decaying champions bear big chain links and bludgeoning weapons spiked and studded. The buildup on top spreads a comparative smoothness over the ornamented craftsmanship of the armor beneath the entropy. An earthen texture that I wouldn’t call without facets. Azure eruptions of color and texture connect these warriors to Mold’s other deep time explorations. Everything left alive now has grown old long ago. Older than most can conceive of. Ancient is still of the same epoch.

Petrified.

Speaking of. Stone and sedentary and aged to the point of crumbling, and still unmistakably figural, a creature. The troll label it’s given connects. Despite the mineral decomposition. Holds the same power as a sketchbook doodle or a toddler’s drawing, but those both imply fast, while these are a story of time. One wields a club turned into a crystalline substance that’s spoorish snowfall is overtaking the troll’s lower body. What substance was the club originally, that it would grow when the rest of its bearer fossilizes? Or is it the kind of weapon a petrified troll would arm themself with? Imagining a moving statue- or, for that matter, fighting a bronze suit of armor with no one inside- is a classic sword and sorcery encounter that adds a delicious metatextual frosting to the miniature cupcake.

One reason that making up detailed, specific scenarios for oblique entities presented mostly without context is so easy is that the reasons are there. The minutiae that serve as fantastic kindling in the mind of the audience was not chance, but put there on purpose by Borelli. I’m kind of besotted with what that says about art, really. If you asked Nick why this detail or that appears on one of his conversions, he could tell you what he was going for. But even Borelli, who is the source of the lore, doesn’t decide how the figures come out. He builds them based on what parts fit right. The damned: within his control, beyond his control. Neat neat neat.

Glass fruit for eyes and big honkin’ blood drips.

There’s a subdued whimsy to Mold Mold Mold. Borelli isn’t going to let a base resemblance to humans- atrophied, devolved, whatever- stand in the way of making a miniature where the flesh has gone fungal. A box with tank treads and a melting skull on top. His goofy and weird is right at home beside the profane and unrecognizable. Mold is never the dragons and knights of NGE and Gundam; here’s the aesthete who recognizes the beauty that is the upside-down claw-foot bathtub design of the Ma.K SAFS unit. The dried out giant skull grows moss like a stone, save the wet giant eyeball tumor coming out of its side, staring at you. Borelli is confident enough to evoke Spongebob Squarepants as well as Brom.

And here I am, searching for peace between the legions of vampire warlords and the gristle grease and chrome of the rat motor hybrids. They’re battle ready, to be sure. But it isn’t their capacity for violence that makes Mold Mold Mold so enchanting, it’s the elegance of their detail. Patlabor, exploring their potential beyond death machines. The whistling cultist carrying a stack of books. The pilgrim’s guide across the waste. Borelli builds the metaphorical mecha, but we’re their pilots. We make them act, we imagine the environment they occupy. There’s enough to them that one can dream a more complex anthropology than (only) ultraviolence.

So my hook is Mold Mold Mold documenting deep time. Borelli doing the Takehide Hori thing, eras have passed, explanations for why things are they way there are (comically mutated and largely eyeless) are long lost. A weird world with secret origins. Borelli’s secret is reading lore from sourcebooks (preferably that lack accompanying illustrations) and imagining where what’s described is headed epochs after people stop resembling people. So Mold Mold Mold may have some storytelling layers lost on me that Warhammer 4K people will be able to pick up.

The only reason I know there are Games Workshop connections (beyond the raw materials the figures are built from) is because the bit in the middle of Mold Mold Mold is a conversation between the publisher and the artist about their work. Hobby. Craft. Borelli talks about his setup (a table for putting stuff together, a table for painting), his friends who make stuff that he uses in his work sometimes, or that commission him with strange requests. How it’s put together, why it’s put together– much of the process is experimentation.

Again, these little details discovered during the miniature’s construction and developed into its character traits are a superfood for the reader’s imagination. It’s an unorthodox mastery of character design: initial ideas about the outcome that guide the build combine with inspiration born from what’s on the table in front of him. An execution that is mostly vibes. Borelli’s textural techniques develop unique details through the act of making. How can something that chance describes be beholden to IP?

We play with Borelli’s miniatures in a way that precludes rationalization. Not knowing the story doesn’t hinder the imagination; what you think is the only lore that matters. DVLSBLSH, who does magnificent no-context screen capture video game art zines, said the intention was to capture the feeling of being young: flipping though a game magazine and getting glimpses of stuff you’d never play but right then, in your head. Yeah. That. Peow2 produces exceptional (and specific) art books on the whole, but this one is ahead of the rest. Taken from the future of monographs. Art without rules, for the love of the game.

Mold Mold Mold is available from Peow2 or wherever fine comics and books are sold.