Although normally you have to pour liquid silicone, it had to be allowed to assume the con-sistency of dough and then exactly worked into its setting or hardening point. The material had to be conditioned or trained to do something it’s not in fact able to. Suddenly I had something in my hands that was both solid and flexible and whose organic nature I actually found fun. Since I could take it with me, I called it To carry around.
PW:Let me try to elucidate the significance
of what you’ve just said in the context
of art. Interestingly enough, here we have
a creature which we know existed at some
time, although it might have been a fictitious
organism. For us it’s important – as you said– that it’s a reproduction. After all, it wasn’t the
animal itself that was discovered, but a cast of
it, so to speak. Many organisms have survived
in palaebiology not simply because their boneshave been found but mainly because of the
impressions left. But we also know that the
impression is an essential factor of sculpture.
The sculptor works in a concealed manner with
respect to the appearance of the past, not the
present. We are used – and it’s important for
me to emphasise this – to sculptors making
models of cats, dogs and cows, i.e. of the
good old domestic animals living around us. I
don’t call that very imaginative. By and large,
they produce sculptures of domestic animals
like horses which are already around us every
day as it is. Therefore, somebody seeking an
animal which has died out and whose appearance
has not been preserved is by itself
an extension of the concept of sculpture.
Although you work as a sculptor, you’ve taken
the concept of sculpture a very long way. But
here’s my next point. We’ve become used
to sculptors working with stone or wood. By
contrast, you use silicone. By expanding the
material properties, the product is subjectto new constraints regarding the way it can be worked. This means you couldn’t simply
cobble together a plaster mould with one hand but needed two components for it to set,
namely silicone, which would have been liquid, and a hardener to hold it together. That’s a
dangerous act. These different materials come together at some point. You can then observe the malleable process, as it were, of these different materials with different setting points. When is it hard enough, when is it too soft? What happened exactly? And was it a manual processs?
MW:Yes, it was a manual process. But what
was really important to me in all this was the
absolute precision of the different elements.
In the case of Hallucigenia Products II which
was called HAL Memory, work concentrated
on one factor – the silicone having a certain
property which, like an elastic band, had a
certain memory.
