Expanding Foam Experiments

So, it's Blue Monday! Never an easy day, no matter the year, but obviously it has hit 10 times harder this year. I'm feeling pretty low and under the weather - hasn't been helped by the fact that I've just had to undo 10 inches of crochet after realising I'd followed the pattern totally wrong... If you're feeling a bit rubbish and miserable, stay strong - know that you are not alone and isolation is only physical - reach out and give someone a call!

This week I've had a bit of a play with a new medium - I've never used expanding foam before - in fact, I've really avoided it, because it seems to have become such a cliche in art school. However, I've been seeing lots of expanding foam experiments in a more domestic setting recently (such as mirror frames and vases) rather than the classic art school enormous sculptures. So I ordered some and started playing around. 

I've also done a bit of drawing - I'm quite obsessed with turkeys - my partner described them as looking like their "heads are crocheted out of flesh", which really sums up their weird fleshy faces in a suitably grotesque way. This one lives at our local inner city farm, which I enjoy visiting when it's not lock downed... My 2 favourite pigs live there, they're called Alan and Nigel and they're absolutely huge and hilarious.
I quite like marrying the texture of the turkey's head with the 3d brain-y vibes of the expanding foam and the added texture of the crochet background - it's definitely not a 'finished piece', but I'm quite happy with it as a starting point.

Nothing else I've worked on this week is ready to be put onto the internet just yet, but I have been doing quite a bit of reading. 

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to go to Australia and saw the absolutely incredible Patricia Piccinini show, "Curious Affection," which completely blew my mind - Sam bought me the show catalogue for Christmas and I've delved into that this week. Patricia's sculptures are absolutely bizarre - surreal, tender and challenging; they play with ideas of genetic modification and the possibility of where science could take us in the future. There's a 'Frankenstein'-esque vibe to them, but they all have such exceptionally soft eyes. I also really enjoyed seeing a couple of her drawings in slightly closer detail - they didn't interest me as much as the sculptures when I saw the show, but looking at the catalogue, I was really drawn to the ideas of bodies and birds; it creates a really magical sense of fragility.