DAY 13

Alright, back in the studio after a long weekend full of Hurricane Irma drama! My sister and her husband live in Tampa, so they were refugees this weekend awaiting the devastating hurricane. Luckily, they seemed to come out without too much damage done to their home. With that said, I did not have a terribly successful weekend in the studio because I was back at home in Anderson, SC for a couple of days. But I am back and ready to work! This weekend I ordered a bunch of new materials to test out. I really want to make some pretty grotesque sculptures that are also beautiful, and I want them to have a lot of characteristics that you would find on the human body, Tissue, blood, adipose, etc. I have ordered some plaster, liquid latex and silicone to make some realistic-seeming sculptures. Those materials won't be arriving until Thursday so today, I am playing with some red wax and cheese cloth for an idea that I have for a live sculpture, or perhaps a video of said sculpture. The photos and videos seem to be much more interesting that my actual small maquette. I don't know if that would change if I did this on a larger scale, but there's no hurt in trying!

For this piece my idea is really about trying to capture the process our bodies go through during blood clotting." For this, I am melting a candle slowly over cheesecloth, (meant to resemble skin tissue) and with that, the wax is dripping through the cloth and forming a puddle onto the floor. As the wax builds up onto the cheese cloth, it is slowly clotting together and covering all of the openings in the cloth. With the melting or decay of the candle, the wax is building up on the cloth, meant to represent our tissue and platelets and forming a skin or barrier so that no more wax may pass through the holes. Here are some images and a video of this piece. Hope you enjoy!