Friday, November 11, 2005

materials






Core Samples 08 What materials do you collect, salvage, save for use on something? Make a list of your favorite materials. What are the materials that you don’t know how to approach or use but find yourself curious about?

This week our assignment was to pick a material and create a project experimenting with the material and its opposite. I became intrigued in working with wax, which was an amazing material that transformed its state. I melted it and then dried it back into a solid. From frozen state I was able to quickly reconfigure it into a liquid, changeable state. Solid turned into liquid turned into solid again—the reaction continued endlessly. This transformation from liquid to solid, as well as the ability to embed objects inside of the material made beeswax as well as candle wax attractive materials for experiment. The wax became a canvas for material collages of various forms.

I had used wax once before, but never fully explored its potential as a material which could create collages with embedded materials. I poured the wax into small “pages” which were meant to be put together into a book work. The books became tactile and sensory experiences. The differently colored and differently combined flat pages constructed three book works with different materials and themes. The exploration evolved into a very hands-on experimental process where I kept adding different found materials into the wax to see what kind of relationships could result within the frozen collages.

I like wax. I like how it embeds things, layers things in space, it is away of doing physical college. It is an alluring medium, but I don’t see the content for the medium yet. It is very physical, more physical than anything else. It is breakable. It is a medium that is not solid, that is not permanent. I think a lot of its appeal lies in that fragile state. Hammett and Chris Bertoni suggested reinterpreting the medium and putting it down again. So, taking a photograph of it, so that it is no longer wax, but illuminated wax on a digital photograph. This would be one iterative aspect of how to use the wax.

One of the other students said, “Wow, you can make a book out of anything” I have done a lot of books out of very different materials. It can be a hindrance if I keep rushing around, trying new things. Whether it is a cyanotype or wax, book prints or the letterpress, I have a very additive approach to design, and at times it gets to be too overwhelming.