After those three weeks of quick-fire briefs, we were given a month to develop something further, inspired from the briefs. Perhaps breaking from expectation, I didn’t select a theme external to me—I chose to explore my own aesthetic boundaries by letting the materials inspire the intervention. And I paid attention to what materials I wanted to play with, and what I didn’t feel like playing with.

I framed it in my head as if I were reclaiming a tendency I’ve had in the past. I wouldn’t call it a scarcity mindset necessarily, but it was still a mindset that attempted to conserve—as a graduate student, I assumed that I could only use equipment already in the lab—it didn’t occur to me to, for the sake of science, expand the universe of possibility larger. Well, we are now in a situation where we as consumers, if we are environmentalists, are trained to thinking about our consumption footprint. As mentioned previously, I think about how we use, value, and discard material. Reusing mandarin peels or plastic bags as part of an artist process felt like I didn’t have to apologize for this side of me anymore. I could frame it as a perk.

I played with a handful of different materials, so rather than plonk that all in one big newsletter, I’ll break it up. So first up, a small short intervention with mandarin peels.

I vaguely remember seeing on the news when I was a teenager, that someone had made little boxes out of orange peels, and it was so much the rage, that even the President of the United States had bought one. Something like that. Looking online to back up this story, the details are lost in time, but I can see that this pastime is as popular as ever.

Rather than make utilitarian boxes, I thought of them as molds, and wanted to make complicated topologies. So I inserted a peeling inside of another peel, and poured plaster within. The outcome was fragile shells of plaster, with the imprint of the rind on the inside surface, and an imprint of the pith on the outside surface.

What does this communicate? Decay, fragility? An inside-out world? A soft-world and hard-world hybrid?

I soon became drawn to other things, but I feel more possibility with this material. Stay tuned.