Portfolio Prep - Part #2

Okay so here is the next of my favourite pieces!

Untitled Piece

Okay so this is my most recent piece which I just finished and it is the piece I am most proud of. It is a skull made out of a melt-able plastic which I had to bend into the shape using a hot-air gun.

When I first started making this piece I was making a skull to mold half of it to my face as part of a sculpture, for my 'Traces' project, which I am looking at and analysing skulls. But as I started to look at what I'd created I began to think of death and the future of humanity. This then lead to me thinking about how the world will eventually end, be it through war or global warming etc. I realized with this piece that no matter what we do as humans, no matter how much fossil fuels we stop burning, the world is going to end whether or not we like it. So from that I began to think of the carnage that would be left, the wastelands of the traces we as a civilization would leave behind. I then decided to have the skull mounted on to a rusted piece of steel which I had scratched a skull into and smashed with a hammer to leave different types of marks to represent the end of the world.

 To the skull mold it into shape I put the plastic up against an actual skull and heat it, so it would melt and I could mold it to the shape of the skull. I then decided to add burns to the nasal passage and eye sockets to give it a more dark and worn effect. Once I had finished the aesthetics of the skull I began thinking of how I could mount it, so I found some rusted steel and some copper wires and spot-welded the wires to the steel and then used a hot-glue gun to attach the skull to the wires.

This is my favourite piece because not only did it take a lot of time and patience to make but it also has a lot of my heart and thoughts with it, I didn't just want it to look good, I wanted people to look at the piece and think about what it means to them, and the message I wanted to convey.