Melting

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a series of Melting objects. The project has a simple inspiration – my fear of things falling apart, and my somewhat curious desire to see things fall apart. I think that desire comes out of the same interest in films about conflict and death; one wants to look upon their fears from a safe distance. I can’t help but smile when I see these everyday things losing their shape, their surfaces dripping like candle wax, while they spread out into a homogenous puddle. Yet I know I’m scared of this happening to me and my world; there is the constant awareness in the back of my mind that everything is more fragile than I’d like it to be. Every day I work towards building a better and larger life, and there’s still just as much chance that it will fall apart. So I play with everyday things, always on a small scale, and always in my control.

‘Melting’ continues to be an interesting organic process of falling apart to impose on these rather static objects. It always seems to produce unexpected results; often disgusting and bodily. It is entropic and irreversible, horrifying and yet beautiful.

I’ve been melting calculators, staplers, tape dispensers, and the tape cassette player at the top of this post. I’m somewhat non-committal in terms of the end product. I have remnants of this process that I plan to display as sculptures, but I also have photographs of the events in-process that I intend to display as well. There are aspects of both that I really love.

I’ll be posting more photographs of my Melting series in the coming weeks.

-Steve