(09/10) Artist and Designer Research

One of the ideas I had initially explored when looking at Chinese Snuff Bottles was the concept of a stimulus that alters the human state kept in a very delicate, very breakable object. If it were to break, as these objects were used to transport the snuff on public outings, their appearance even suggesting that they were showed off, if broke could do damage if around children, or others who may struggle around breathing. Then to be designed to sit in a fragile container seems like tempting fate. Towing a very fine line. It was that Beijing gets very cold in the winter, and they found that the glass bottles, if used in the wintertime, would often shatter from the cold.

When looking for artists that explore the juxtaposition of delicate and dangerous I came across—

.Do Ho Suh— they build large architectural structures out of coloured translucent materials

Their appearance is delicate and yet the exhibits are available for months at a time, evidently holding their structure.

.Lauren DiCioccio

.Livia Marin

Each of these artists main feature is the change in material used to depict the object and how that then influences us and our interaction with it. Do Ho Suh for example does so on a 1:1 scale that then makes you no longer think of the material as fragile, rather the way the material coats the entire environment giving it all the same hue creates a disorientating place. Familiar objects and spaces suddenly rendered strange by this change in colour.

Like Livia Maria’s work I hope to highlight the fragility of the piece. By giving the objects the appearance of having melted. As it is a process in which the electron particles get energy causing them to vibrate quicker, creating a greater space between them, but instead of flopping partially in a solid state, they melt into a liquid it conveys a weak internal structure due to the supposedly low boiling point. How intact the patterns are though makes the process/ imagery seem natural, like it would occur to all crockery under the right circumstances.

With Lauren DiCioccio‘s work I like the malleability that the fabric gives the objects, the lack of structure.