cardboard gallore/ October-November

As I was thinking about my battle with finding a material which allowed me to pick up a more 3 dimensional-ness from the surface of the bricks (and fighting with a frustratingly slow drying time with the cardboard smeared on the brick), it occurred to me to take a full cast of the brick (rather than just the surface of it).

I ended up working for weeks, making life sized cardboard bricks like this one. I was and am pleased with them, particularly the rugged edges.

Furthermore, the brick is fascinatingly strong/sturdy and retains few of the properties one would expect to find in a cardboard box. The brick looks fairly light weight and I wonder if there will be something to explore further in that.

The proccess of working with the cardboard, turning it to a pulp and then using the pulp to create becomes interesting when you think about it in terms of 'deconstruction and reconstruction'. It's something I'm aware of while I continue to develop these explorations.

At best, the bricks take an hour each to make. At worst (depending on blenders etc) something more like 1.5 to 2 hours each. The proccess became tedious, particularly as the bricks require weeks (literally) to dry out. I made upwards of 30 life sized bricks but then I stopped. I had a few ideas about what I wanted to do with them, once I had made a collection, but all my ideas required hundreds of bricks and I felt the whole proccess was too time intensive for the stage of exploration I was at. I also knew there would be no hard in leaving them be and returning to them at a later date.

In between brick making, I attempted to use the pulp to construct 3-D floor plans of houses I lived in. I started tracing out the floor plans, with the pulp, onto the inside bases of cardboard boxes. I experimented with a number of things, adding pigment to the pulp etc, but didn't come up with anything of much interest at least in terms of the floor plans.