Back in the studio I did some work on preparing for the hydrocal moulds, which is a brush-on method which creates a very flexible rubber like mould. My object is a citrus squeezer. I’m not sure how I will hybridize this object yet but one thought is to get some citrus fruits, squeeze them and remove the pith then desiccate them and arrange them with the squeezer.
Its pretty frantic switching between the frames and the hydrocal and unfortunately I have a drawing class straight after the 3D class so I don’t get time to finish as much work as I would like. Back to the hydrocal. Jeff showed us how to make the plastic moulds by mixing carefully measured parts of the the chemicals and then applying multiple coats of hydrocal over our objects. In the end I used 5 coats which created a pretty strong and stable mould which should not need a mother mould to prevent it from distorting.
The mould came off the grater quite nicely, but the structure of the grater is so complex that it turns out it is not possible to recreate the whole object in the casting, but sufficient for a pleasing amount of detail. Not sure still how I will combine the objects, thinking about some options with desiccated fruit, or perhaps creating a montage using fruit photos and the grater profiles….
Unlike many of the other students i didn’t have a very clear ideation at the start of this process. I found the shape of the squeezer pleasing which was part of the reason behind choosing this object. I had hoped that through the molding and casting process the narrative might start emerging. Using the casts to squeeze oranges is perhaps a little obvious without a clear narrative, but i have started in order to see where it takes me.
Thinking about the oranges took me back to a recurring theme in my work which has been the use of orange ping pong balls. So i incorporated them with the squeezer to see what might happen.
Also the pastel shades from the cassette tape project seemed worth another visit.
i rather like the idea of producing a series of similar images a bit like the work of Andy Warhol. I appreciate this is outside of the scope of this assignment but it actually resonates a bit more with me than the original scope of the work – perhaps it’s for another day…
