Step 3, getting the adhesive onto the petri dishes!
I cut out each cross-section by hand and lined them up with the petri dishes using a printed guide underneath.
There is a technique for applying adhesive vinyl where the image is aligned, then a strip of the backing is either cut or folded, so that a small section of the sticky side holds the image in the right place while the rest is peeled off and stuck down. Needless to say I got a lot of practice after doing this about 70 times over…
The result was fantastic, a huge improvement on the real fruit pieces as you can now actually see through each layer. This was especially effective when it was lit from underneath - displayed on a lightbox.
I used an old OHP, and love the conceptual connotations this brought into play. As brought up in the cross-group crit, combined with the old school projector the work begins to reference education, nostalgia, tacky ‘eat your 5+ a day’ posters, science fair projects, museum displays for kids - ‘making science fun!’ - such as ‘weird and wonderful’ section.
You can see it clearly with the OHP light off:
I displayed the banana divided into two so that it was exactly the same height as the elongated tomato and kiwifruit.
The problems addressed in our discussion were
-Jon thinks the petri dishes might be ‘too obvious’ a reference to the world of science - perhaps just the technique of dissecting them or mapping them out could be enough
-It was also mentioned that the usual function of a petri dish is for things to be grown inside it, and using them to present something preserved or static could be problematic as it makes them a display object instead.
--Ardit prefers the use of real fruit because he says he wants to see it decompose etc.
…I’m afraid this last comment was water off a duck’s back, however. I’m not interested in using fruit and veg themselves as materials - perishable artworks that smell bad after a few days are just not my jam. What I’m interested in are representations of food, deconstructed and reconstructed and, yes, in the process, preserved. I get excited about the 3d becoming digital image becoming sculptural again, and different techniques for doing this - that element of translation between media, between worlds. I want my work to be about genetic modification, the idea of the synthetic, resulting from scientific interference with nature. Printmaking, in a broad sense, addresses this, in a way that ‘just using the thing itself’ does not. To me that seems like the cheap way out even if it is very ‘elam’. Sorry, not sorry.
-the banana being divided by two into 2x to-scale objects while the other two were stretched out. When this was explained the responses were mixed. It seems the idea of dividing each one into multiples was exciting, but this way of presenting it was perhaps a bit confusing. There is a good opportunity to play around with different arrangements here.
Something that wasn’t brought up but which really bugged me was the fact that despite my best efforts I didn’t quite get the banana to line up correctly - it looks a bit disjointed. Perhaps I’ll have to make another trip to V3.
