Ice Sculpture

So I decided to go with Marc Quinn's idea of bringing a more personal aspect into your work and I decided to create a mold of my head using dental alginate. After the images that you saw previously, I poured water into the mould and had a difficult time getting the water to stay in the mould, as the plastic bags weren't holding it well. Once I established this, I then used a black bin liner to act as another layer for the water and this held it much better.

I took it out of the freezer after a day and it wasn't completely frozen in the middle and the water had seeped through the plastic bags and kind of frozen in layers and had an outside cast of the box that i've set it in. 

I chipped that away and ended up with a separate  unexpected sculpture, which was really quite interesting. You could the imprint of my face in the ice. Once this has kind of fallen off in a large chunk, I then put the mould back in the freezer to let it set more. I decided to use the square chunk of ice that I come off as another piece of work and I added brush-o dye to it. The cracks in the eye allowed the brush-o to seep into them, making parts of it look like colourful veins and part of the body, which related well to my project about my life. I had previously had an idea about getting close up imagery of the palm of my hand and use that in a way to define the different layers and memories that have built up over the years. Once the brush-o caused the vein effect, this idea became more apparent within my mind and has made me think about how I could link it in more with my project. This was the outcome of adding brush-o dye to the sculpture:

Today I have taken the ice mould of the freezer and it was completely frozen. After I chipped away at the eye and put it under hot water to get the plastic bag off it, I ended up with just the ice and the mould. I had someone take a video of me picking off the dental alginate off the ice, as that was quite interesting in itself. The dental alginate however, cracked due to the water expanding in the freezer. This caused the piece to not work as well. Once i'd got all of the mould off the ice, there wasn't really much detail in the ice, so I wasn't able to get what I wanted, which was the detail of the mould in the ice, enabling me to video it dripping away.

I had my teacher film me as I revealed the ice underneath the mould, to achieve the effect of 'peeling back the layers', much like peeling back memories to gather the deeper meaning and this is what we got:

Revealing the Ice

I managed to get most of the mould off using hot water to ease the mould away from the ice and I don't think the ice coped well with being handled so much, so it didn't work as planned.

Although this didn't work as well as i'd hoped, I did get a good video piece and an ice sculpture which I added brush-o to, which has given me other ideas for the project, including the palm of my hands.