Trimmings

Medium. Liquid Latex

Year. 2015

  A certain Fixation on flesh lead me to my local butcher shops and out of all the moments I spent watching them, one stands out amongst all others. One expert butcher was working on a piece of meat and was trimming the little scraps of excess fat off the prime cut but instead of throwing each individual scrap separately. He began to accumulate them in his free hand methodically adding more bit by bit, piece by piece. Until he had a blob of scraps all stuck together. When he was finally done he dumped them onto the counter. This fist full of flesh stuck in my mind and the sculptural quality of his work impressed me to no degree. When I started to look back on this experience I remembered a fact that Id been told in elementary school that the closed fist was round about the same size as the human heart. The connection with the lump of flesh was very straight forward in my head. So I set out to replicate the process but give a slightly more defined shape than just an ordinary blob. So by combining the various scraps of colored latex I achieved a shape that reminded me of the human heart by eliminating the non essential and presenting only the slightest hint of form. The Idea was not replicate the organ but instead replicate what I saw and what I thought when I saw the Butcher at work. I'm not sure but significantly certain that Blob of scraps was thrown in the dustbin even though to me it was the most significant thing in the room. The color of this piece was inspired by the Masala mixture that the meat was coated with in the marination process that was being done simultaneously by another butcher.