Utilising My Habits

Being aware of and using my habits

In preparation for my University interviews, I had numerous talks with my tutors wherein we talked thoroughly about my work and how I work. It was during the second talk when he made me aware of something I was constantly doing without fully realising it, and that is my habitual need to collect objects or sae past experiments so that I can use them later, as well as my fixation with leaving objects or past experiments to change with the weather or any other natural processes.

With the beginning of my FMP, I have decided to attempt to utilise and explore with what I am now aware of, but creating things with this in mind is proving to be much more challenging than doing it subconsciously. 

The first thing I did when thinking about creating a piece that is constantly changing was bring an old plant pot from behind the building. My thoughts were to encase the plant pot in plaster, and then break the plaster case, however I found myself struggling to get the plaster and pot out of the bucket in its entirety.

The pot had been outside for a very long time and had split over time. Because of this split, the plaster had got into the plant pot which acted as an anchor into the plaster and had effectively joined both the plaster and the pot together. The volume of the plaster meant that I was unable to stretch the bucket so pull it away from the plaster, and I had tried hating the side and the bottom of the bucket to loosen the plaster, but it didn't work.

I didn't want to tip the bucket over for the fear of ruining the plants, which were to be a big part of the  project, but eventually, I realised that I would have to in order to loosen the entire thing from the bucket.

I also used a pallet knifer and paint scraper and ran it around the edges of both the plaster and the plant pot to aid with loosing it. 

Eventually, the plant pot came loose and I was able to pull it out. Unfortunately, the plaster remained in the bucket because it was too close the the edge of the bucket to be able to push it out. 

At that point I realised that if I were to get it out whole, it would be like a tunnel. The plaster at the bottom of the bucket was extremely thin because I had used the plant pot too far in, so I was able to clear it out, leaving just the plaster around the edge of the bucket.

In the end, I had to use a paint scraper to cut through the plaster and cut it in half to allow a little bit of movement. When it eventually started coming loose, it can out in sections because the plaster hadn't fully set.

While the plaster was setting around the plant pot, I started to experiment with casting the inside of a glove. It was purely a spur of the moment experiment that led to interesting results.

The first attempt at casting a glove was messy, as the glove had split due to trapped air while I was pouring the plaster in. The second experiment had a lot more texture in it because the plaster had thickened considerable between the first experiment and the second. In both cases, a lot of the digits fell off while the plaster was setting because I kept moving the gloves looking for a suitable place to put them. The glove casts without fingers looked a lot more interesting than they would with all digits intact.

The first cast was a lot smoother, but some of the digits had got stuck together, making it impossible to remove the plastic of the glove without pulling off the remaining two digits.

The second cast had lost all digits but one, and was smooth in some places and more bumpy in others. I much prefer this cast for the texture.

Because I chose to cast a glove rather than a hand, the indentations and marks left on the plaster after it had set make it seem a lot more alien and abstract. I like the idea of creating a cast of something that looks completely different to what it should. In this case, the accidents led to really interesting work that I want to continue to develop.