VACUUM FORM/LASER CUT FINAL OUTCOME

Anatomical Sketches & Laser cut jewellery.

I recently found these images in a text book of a friend who studies Medicine. 

she also had a set of prosthetic human bones which gave me an idea for the laser cutting aspect of our brief.  By using the anatomical sketches above, i turned an originally 3d object into a 2d laser cut acrylic representation .

Bespoke Prosthetic Limbs

Bespoke Innovations is a company that creates custom prosthetic limbs for amputees based not only on their physical needs, but their tastes and personalities as well. They find out what type of interests the customer has, what type of materials and patterns and visuals appeal to them and what kind of completely unique prosthetic will reflect their personality to the world.Then the company takes that information and uses rapid prototyping (3D printing) to create a one-of-a-kind artificial limb that is exactly what the customer wants. No factory parts are ever used; no coldly impersonal one-look-fits-all pieces are churned out. Each and every prosthetic produced by Bespoke is made for a specific user.

 

Addressing the Century- 100 years of Art and Fashion

These images are taken from the book named in the title and accompanied an exhibition the Hayward Gallery of the same name in 1998.

Yayoi Kusama Dress (1976)

Pierre Cardin Men's shoes with toes (1986)

Meret Oppenheim Project for Parkett No. 4 (1985)

Elsa Schiaparelli Monkey Fur Shoes (1938)

The Red Model

The Red Model
Oil on Canvas
1935, 74 cm x 50 cm

Rene Magritte made masterful fantasies of everyday objects such as an old pair of shoes. He made more paintings of this subject but this was one of his earliest of shoes turning into feet. He has meticulously painted the details of the pebbles on the ground, the dust covered toes, laces on the boots, and the grain of the wood fence. Magritte makes fantasy by painting reality carefully with unexpected changes. I think I'd like to see a prosthetic version of this painting come to life. 

 

Below is someone's attempt at a modern recreation of The Red Model created using Photoshop and two separate photographs
 

Rene Magritte, Philosophy in the Boudoir. 1947.

The perilous adventures of Vacuum Forming.

Inspired by the Yves Saint Laurent crepe georgette evening dresses and

 Copper body sculpture and cuff by Claude Lalanne

(Fall/Winter 1969)and the amazing costumes worn by Jane Fonda in Barbarella (see previous post) i have decided to attempt creating my own female bust to be incorporated into a fashion garment by using Vacuum forming. vacuum forming, is a simplified version of thermoforming, whereby a sheet of plastic is heated to a forming temperature, stretched onto or into a single-surface mould and held against the mold by applying vacuum between the mold surface and the sheet.

these were a first attempt at making a mould of the female form, however it collapsed into itself before i had a chance to refine the shape as it was too heavy and not reinforced in the right areas. 

The second attempt worked much better. For the first view layers i used bandage plaster strips, and filled it in with plaster of paris. 

After i had achieved the overall shape i wanted i had to smooth over the outer plaster-bandage layer. Using my hands i applied plaster of paris onto the outer layer, i then filled in the cracks and eneven elements and sanded it down. To fit into the vacuum form it has to be of certain measurements so i sawed off the neck and lower torso. 

Below are the after-shots of my sculpture once it had been into the vacuum form. Devastatingly it was crushed by the force of the plastic used and the wrong settings in the vacuum form. 

ouchhhh.

this resulted in a plastic bust with a bubbly surface (due to too much heat) and a crushed neck/upper torso. Quite attractive. 

this guy was thrown in the bin.

Meet sculpture #3

Hopefully it's third time lucky.