Iron
50 x 50 x 5 cm.
Nov. 2011 - Jan 2012
This is the first piece of a project which I developed during the year I stayed in Sweden as an erasmus. The project theme was identity: what makes a person different? what makes each person special? what is an identity made of? why do we have the need to be so unique, yet so integrated in a group? what do we use to define our identity? this are some of the questions that define the proyect.
Back then I had a diary blog, where I posted all of my thoughts, research and progress on this project:
"Recently, when I go out to party, I've been noticing something that I found quite funny, but also quite interesting: how everybody is doing their best to look as good, beautiful, sexy, etc as possible, making efforts to look like intelligent, funny and interesting people...
The reasons each one have are up to themselves (searching for friends/ hooking up / having fun), but it got me thinking about how we try to disguise ourselves, that image we are generating is only a really small piece of all our identity, and in some cases, it's not even that, it's a lie. It also works in the opposite way: how can you know that a person you just met is being him/herself? As you get to know a person better, you usually notice that they aren't as marvellous as the originally looked like...They have bad days, they aren't always that funny/intelligent/etc, they aren't as good looking as they were, etc..."
That is the motivation of this piece: first impressions and how we manipulate them. I made an iron mirror very reflective in it's central zone, as in the first impressions, and then, towards the borders, it gets opaque, cracked, rusted, just as it happens when you meet a person: at first, you'll see the image he or she wants to give, it's a deformed image, but quite flashy and clear, then, as you get to know him or her better, you start to notice the rusty parts, the cracks, their imperfections that makes them human.
This piece is an introduction to the whole proyect, simply looking at it, you'll see your deformed image, which leads to think about who are you and what is the image you are trying to give to other people, the whole piece it's considered a mirror, although you won't be able to see yourself on all it's surface.
I used iron plates and welded them with a gas mixture welder. When the whole structure was welded, I burnt and melt the borders to make them uneven, and used the heat from that to rust the piece. I welded the central zones and polished them with a grinding disc so the central zone would have a greater fade, and would look more like a single piece instead of several iron plates put together. The piece itself didn't turn out to be exactly as I planned at first, I found several problems with the welding process, as the plates were too thin for the techniques I was using on them, they melted, deformed and behaved in different and weird ways, which I had to deal with and adapt to the idea. On the other hand, I found really interesting and useful learning about gas welding.
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