Photos of the installation on Die Schute in Hamburg in 2019 (taken by Jana de Jonge). The work was partially funded by Fonds Kwadraat. The poster is done by me and features the biggest cast, which you can see in other pictures as well, aged quite a bit more.
How do you visualise something that changes over time?
Struck by the omnipresence of plastic in our world of today, I felt a desire to make this overabundance insightful and started saving containers, re-using them by filling them up with alginate. Alginate is a powder made of algae, which becomes a kind of jelly when mixed with water. Gradually the water evaporates out of the alginate and the form starts to change and mould. All the casts therefore have slightly different way of changing, depending on the time (duration) and the climate of their surrounding environment. Because of this dependency they become specific characters, all different from one another.
In the summer of 2019 I showed the work on a boat in Hamburg, in conjunction with a series of drawings I did before, where the bottles were displayed on styrofoam pedestals. The work is still ongoing, the collection and variety of shapes is still expanding. Currently I am documenting them in different ways, photographing as well as 3D-scanning them – which could eventually become part of the installation. Within this process the question “how to document movement through time?” arises continuously.
#negativespace
#GiorgioMorandi
#anthropo(s)cene
#bioplastic
#climatechange
Radiator
2018–2021
Photograms of the alginate bottles, made with special photographic paper which reacts to light extremely slowly so it can also capture the change of the alginate itself.
100% alginate