Step by step
If I don’t write for a while, it’s because I’m in the middle of something and I don’t really know what’s going on. And then, before I know it, the deadline is upon me, and it must come to a close. It just came to a close this Monday.
I’ve already talked about the discomfort of the not knowing in the creative process. All you need is one experience of being within that and still persevering, to know that as uncomfortable as it is, that’s where the gold is. And I really was in that state until this last week, when pulling it all together for my submission helped me synthesize what had just happened.
I continued to work with plaster, and followed two paths - one took the petal drops one more step, to create a plaster flower. The other path dug deeper into using coconut oil and margarine as molding material.
A fun aspect of using oil as a molding material is one can create cavities in plaster easily with hot water to melt the oil. I made cubes because, well, it’s easy to make a cube. Funny how these little non-decisions can become intention. These so called “bone cubes” resembled bone somehow, but because of the cube shape, are completely unnatural.
The margarine was an experiment in finding perhaps a cheaper solid oil - and I discovered an oil with different properties - it’s softer at room temperature than coconut oil, but also doesn’t melt under body temperature as quickly as coconut oil. It wasn’t great for these bone cubes, but it could still flow at room temperature. Hence, these “flow casts.” the margarine was shaped into a depression, plaster poured, and then it was swirled.
These were fun. They flowed, they looked like sea creatures, or planets.
What next? At this time, I really was in the depths of the not knowing. What to do with these things? Are they done? Are they a thing? What do they even mean?