Process

Today I started physically making things, experimenting with using sugar as a material. Sugar interests me on a few different levels- its physical temperament is interesting- at moments jewel like, potentially glass like and clear, or a fine crystal sand. So addictive and with such a tragic history surrounding the slave labour used in its farming and production. It has become a modern commodity which completely takes over our brains and has extreme effects on the body and mind. I want to be working with preciousness and opulence, both as subject matter and materially. I want to use sugar if possible in a way that appears to be precious- like amber or crystal- when actually it is a very cheap material. I started today by experimenting with a primitive form of casting. I dug into clay with what tools i had available to me in my caravan and poured the molten sugar into them. my hope is that they will keep their form and that i can wait until the clay is hard and crack it open like I have excavated it from a rock or ancient peat. The clay doesn't pick up detail in the way I would like it to, so I am considering moving on to silicone. I also worry that the sugar doesn't seem to last well- it appears to sweat in cold damp environments, which is cornwall right now. I could potentially introduce corn syrup and see if that helps it keep its form, or I could experiment with combining the sugar with transparent wax or resin. This could mean losing some of the crystalline texture of the sugar, but it could also potentially be interesting in its own way. I also thought about casting twigs and using wax to make the form, meeting it with gold leaf in a kind of reference to bones, death, and the Reliquary of the Tooth of Mary Magdalene, a 14th century gold and crystal relic allegedly presenting the tooth of St. Mary Magdalene in the centre of a crystal egg. 

Below are pictures of the beginning of my experimentation. I cast twigs, made my own artefacts, and worked a blind drawing of a nude into the clay to see if there is a way to find life in the blind drawings beyond the page. I like the idea of them becoming physical objects, but I wonder if there is value in that if they aren't really physical objects, but just become three dimensional drawings. maybe it would be more interesting to do blind sculptures from clay rather than trying to interpret a drawing in clay.

there is a quality to the sugar twigs that i like- they take on a kind of coral look. Although that isn't what I am looking for, it still interests me, and I like the accidental spreading which connects the two twigs.