This week our assignment was to pick a material and create a project experimenting with the material and its opposite. I became intrigued in working with wax, which was an amazing material that transformed its state. I melted it and then dried it back into a solid. From frozen state I was able to quickly reconfigure it into a liquid, changeable state. Solid turned into liquid turned into solid again—the reaction continued endlessly. This transformation from liquid to solid, as well as the ability to embed objects inside of the material made beeswax as well as candle wax attractive materials for experiment. The wax became a canvas for material collages of various forms.
I had used wax once before, but never fully explored its potential as a material which could create collages with embedded materials. I poured the wax into small “pages” which were meant to be put together into a book work. The books became tactile and sensory experiences. The differently colored and differently combined flat pages constructed three book works with different materials and themes. The exploration evolved into a very hands-on experimental process where I kept adding different found materials into the wax to see what kind of relationships could result within the frozen collages. I combined plastic 3-D letters, flat plastic bags, snippets from a “how to write” English book, threads, leather scraps, and plastic disks into my assemblages.
