The Progress of a Moulding Artwork

Here, I have documented the progress of a moulding artwork that I produced about four weeks ago and have photographed up to this date. I started off by using a combination of food items, such as bread, yoghurt and orange juice with paint to create an abstract piece on canvas board in the hope that it would decay over time. I used brightly coloured acrylic paint as I wanted to see if it would change the colour of the mould that grew or become part of it but it seems the mould has just grown over it. This to me, is such an interesting piece. I never thought that my artwork would be this far in the decay process in just four weeks. I like that I created the initial piece but the only controlling factor changing the artwork is time. I cannot control how much mould or what type of changes develop within this piece which is part of the reason why this project is so appealing as the end result is a surprise to me as well. Time is again strongly embedded in this artwork and in a way was the artist. I put down the starting point and time itself completed it.

I think this is a highly successful piece as it captures food decay and a strong sense of time incredibly accurately. Above all, I feel they are highly interesting and beautiful pieces. I have made something considered to be disgusting and undervalued look visually attractive and allowed it to be considered as art. My initial Inspiration for making something and letting it rot over time was the work of JOHANNA MARTENSSON.

JOHANNA MARTENSSON

The piece of hers that inspired my work in particular was “Bread City”.

Johanna Built a City out of Bread and watched it and photographed it decaying over a period of six months. This is an incredibly simple piece, as is mine but it is highly effective. Johanna said she was inspired by an article that claimed the earth would eventually regenerate itself despite humanity’s worst efforts. “Within 500 years  all buildings would be half fallen or fallen, perfect homes for animals and  plants”. She then began to wonder what humanity’s decay might look like in  reality. And so the bread city was born. I think it is very inspiring that she used food decay to relate to life and this is something I am definitely going to look into during my project experimentation.

Johanna inspired me to document the moulding of food over time in the first place. After seeing this artwork, I was intrigued as to what would happen if I made a kind of painting that could be put on the wall using food and photographed its decay. Below are images of the first and last photographs I took of my decaying art piece.