Matt

Description

My ideas have changed since the beginning of this project. Initially I felt bound to the rubber chicken and bottle and was mainly interested in changing their materiality. Since this experimentation, I have been thinking - a rubber chicken is a rubber chicken and a bottle is a bottle, whatever material it is made out of, so what comes next? At the same time, some of the forms I was making started to remind me of how nature can take over a form and create a seemingly impossible new form. An example of this is the aluminium bottle cast forced inside the rubber chicken and an image I found of a snake eating a baby hippopotamus. The rubber chicken and snake are left in an intermediate metamorphic state referencing the form they have just consumed.


From this idea I have became interested in process and how making something can lead to the formation of new visual and practical connections for producing new sculptures. At the moment I am working on two pieces which investigate transformation of objects and the process that created them. One is a mold made out of broken glass bottles, which takes on a form resembling a bulging section of a snake. The other is a sculpture of a snake, part transformed into the crowbar I used to smash the bottles for the previous mold. From these, I aim to carry out different processes to make new works which follow on in a connected way from the previous sculptures.

My rethought approach to this project is to make my sculptural process an inanimate object, where the processes used and connections made within the body work can be observed by an audience.




Reference
A book I’m reading at the moment is Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and other stories (833.91 K12Fm). Metamorphosis is the first story (about 50 pages), it’s funny and interesting. There’s a bit on wikipedia.com about it as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis