Last Flower project-interim crit

The Last Flower

Brief description: Document it before it dies since there will never be another one. Choose a single flower, it must be a single flower. Consider any and all media in your investigations, as a means to capture the 'experience' of the flower as well as its all physical attributes.

My starting point begun from capturing the presence of the flower around my house rather than its physical appearance and during the documentation, I had to move around the flower around my flat when I was taking care of my friend's cat, I realised the space of emptiness when I moved it in different places. I took series of photographs in each cases, eg. flower in living room to my room etc, and I marked the presence of a flower highlighting it with black and white photograph in contrast to its original coloured photographs. Since this did not follow the brief which it had to show the process of flower dying gradually, I then moved on to thinking about how I can capture the existence of a flower in an very accurate way that is possible.

                                                                                                      EXPERIMENTS                                             

So, I thought of few different ideas to capture the physical appearance of a flower and I decided to embalm it so that the viewer can see it different angles, touch and observe it in an very accurate manner. 

First, I used Fine leaf Gelatine mixed with PVA glue(so that it holds the gelatine and flower together). I needed a structure to fill in the Gelatine so I used half of ordinary juice box and poured the liquid in there to settle. For rest, I followed the same process that involves making Jelly, and later I added my bits of dead flowers at the top and waited few good hours to get the result.

Flower in Gelatine+PVA glue 

Also, through the documentation I collected some amount of water from the flower pot underneath the flower. I was really thinking of communicating the presence of the flower in this way that I am not giving the viewer direct image of flower but rather presenting them the existence of it.

This is a failure test that I have done before I started Gelatine with PVA, that I tried mixing it with red ink and poured in a structure that I have cut out from a form board. The result went horrible wrong but I think I quite enjoyed working in 3D forms which I haven't done since I started this course :)