Wax packaging
Wax, plastic, plastic and wax, wax and plastic?
- Course name: The process of creative thinking
- Timeline: 7 weeks
- Student:Birna Sísí Jóhannsdóttir
- Mentor: Theódóra Alfreðsdóttir
At the beginning of the course, a task was set to create a sculpture from wax and a one other material of free choice. The only condition was that the sculpture had to be 30 cm high and that the materials had to support each other, ie. that both substances were essential to each other.
I experimented with many topics in the first week to find something that I found interesting.
Of all the experiments I had performed, I found the ones that contained plastic the most interesting. The property of wax is that it is easy to shape, it absorbs various textures. The plastic on the other hand is flexible and can be formed into various shapes.
I wanted to explore further the possibilities of the materials and the way they work together without removing the other material like the one I described in the above image.
Wax poured into a plasticbag and spread in such a way that when it hardened, a cavity formed and the wax resembled a plastic bag despite containing no plastic.
So I worked with plastic film (the one used for food packaging) and wax. The experiments turned out as objects that reminded me of something organic , a body part.
I wanted to focus even more on the properties of the plastic in the task of creating the sculpture. When making the sculpture, I tore parts from plastic film and placed them on boiling hot wax. I then used a heat gun to heat the film from above as well. This created holes in each film, giving it an even more organic feeling. As af it was a web of skin.
After putting each part in boiling wax I poured each film into water to form a certain shape. When I had a considerable amount of film units, I constructed them in a sculpture according to the holes that were found on each film. I therefore had limited control over how the sculpture was arranged.
Second half of experiments
The making of the sculpture was time consuming and I began to lean towards finding a way to get rid of the plastic but lacked a starting point that had a logical explanation.
At first I made a mold out of hard plastic and poured the wax into the mold in a water bath, intending to use the plastic as a mold to make multiple wax units.
What became more interesting, however, was when the wax from the mold leaked out of the mold and on to the water. When I took it out of the water, the wax stretched and it formed a long strips that seemed to have never end. These strips then reminded me of the plastic films I had been working with in the beginning of the process.
Given that the units began to resemble a plastic film, I began to consider the possibility of using the wax in the same way as plastic films are utilized. The wax has, of course, the same preservative value as plastic. From this point I started to experiment with food packaging.
The idea is to use the wax to wrap food in small units that would be manageable but at the same time unmanageable due to the fragility of the wax. The food is therefore wrapped in wax and then the wax is broken off.
What surprised me most in the process was how the process went hand in hand unconsciously and the first attempts correspond to the last ones. I started working with two random materials that share the common preservation value. However they are different when it comes to melting point, texture, etc. Subsequently, the various experiments that eventually come together and make sense “unintentionally”.
