The 1st, 6th, 14th, 18th and 21st abstraction of the shape of a toilet roll

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  Brooding Experiment | 2019

Brooding Experiment is a visual conversation around the shape of an object. The making process involves two materials assigned to two artists that are in conversation through the process. On the one hand, there is an artist working with sellotape, wrapping it around an object in such a way that it attempts to repeat and preserve the object’s shape even after the sellotape is cut off of it (see fig 1.). Such an act of sellotaping empties out the shape of an everyday object while repeating it imperfectly, outlining the fragility and temporality of the experience of its shape. The see-through sellotape ‘duplicate’ doesn’t only represent the shape itself; it also adds the events in the work process of sellotaping (through unintentional dents, folds, fingerprints etc.) to the original shape. Sellotape is the ‘voice’ that is trying to approach and penetrate the shape, the voice destined to inaccuracy (sellotape can only approximate the shape but not repeat it). Sellotaping embodies the inaccuracy of subjective, once-in-a-lifetime experience of an object. On the other hand, there is the plaster that tries to fill this sellotaped near-duplicate, taking the experience of the original shape for granted without questioning its identicalness to the original shape. The plaster eliminates the fragility of the sellotape remake and casts its subjectivity into a rigid, new structure (see fig 2.). The work process begins with the original object being sellotaped. Then this sellotape remake is cast with plaster, conserving all the differences and imperfections of this fragile sellotape object. Then this new plaster object – considered a new basis – is sellotaped as well, followed by this new sellotape remake of the plaster object being cast with plaster etc. During the process, the sellotape forms function as moulds and are most likely to be destroyed during the casting. It is important to consider this dialogue a system, where the elements of the system are meant to determine the outcome. Once the sellotape “mould” is made and handed to the artist using the plaster, its dents, changes and alterations (compared to the original object) must be kept and cast as they are: no corrections should be made. As this visual conversation unfolds, the original shape is left behind for a mere spectre that hardly resembles the original object (see fig 3.). This way, the attempts at casting different stages of the abstraction of the original object will result in a piece that is less a replica of the original shape and more the sum of the working process. The idea in the background of this experiment is twofold: on the one hand, it talks about the artist’s experience of trying to explain an idea (artistic or otherwise, in English or in any other language). Through these attempts, she is continuously distilling the original idea into something that sometimes hardly resembles the starting point. On the other hand, it also speaks about the anxiety around the inevitable distortion involved in this process. It examines how anxiety forces one to continuously revisit and re-examine an object of thought. Such repetitive thinking makes one brood over this object inside one’s own head, a struggle of so many re-evaluations that the original thing loses its objective connection to reality, its original contours, and turns into a haunting spectre of its origin.