ucs

when I first started working with sugar it kept crystallizing and as I had never worked with the material before it took a few experiments to correct it, after failing quite a few times to get the sugar to set properly and stop it crystallizing I eventually did some research and found that for a “hard crack” which is what I needed my sugar to be I needed to heat it to around 298f to 303f, after I sorted that problem I then had to look at why the sugar was crystallizing I found something called inverted sugar but it was extremely expensive almost £20 a kilo.

bearing this in mind I then researched what made an inverted sugar so special and why it then didn’t crystallize, this is what I found;

“Inverted or invert[1] sugar syrup is a mixture of glucose and fructose; it is obtained by splitting sucrose into these two components. Compared with its precursor, sucrose, inverted sugar is sweeter[2][3][dubious – discuss] and its products tend to retain moisture and are less prone to crystallization. Inverted sugar is therefore valued by bakers, who refer to the syrup as invert syrup.[4] It is similar to high-fructose corn syrup.

In technical terms, sucrose is a disaccharide, which means that it is a molecule derived from two simple sugars (monosaccharides). In the case of sucrose, these monosaccharide building blocks are fructose and glucose. The splitting of sucrose is a hydrolysis reaction. The hydrolysis can be induced simply by heating an aqueous solution of sucrose, but more commonly, catalysts are added to accelerate the conversion. The biological catalysts that are added are called sucrases (in animals) and invertases (in plants). Sucrases and invertases are types of glycoside hydrolase enzymes. Acid, such as lemon juice or cream of tartar, can also accelerate the conversion of sucrose to invert.”

“Inverted sugar syrup can be easily made by adding water and roughly one gram of citric acid per kilogram of sugar.[5] (Lemon juice is 5% to 6% citric acid, with a negligible amount of ascorbic acid, so this would correspond to about 20 grams of lemon juice per kilogram of sugar.) Cream of tartar (one gram per kilogram)[5] or fresh lemon juice (10 milliliters per kilogram) may also be used.

The mixture is boiled to get to a temperature of 114 °C (237 °F),[5] and will convert enough of the sucrose to effectively prevent crystallization, without giving a noticeably sour taste. Invert sugar syrup may also be produced without the use of acids or enzymes by thermal means alone: two parts granulated sucrose and one part water simmered for five to seven minutes will convert a modest portion to invert sugar.

In confectionery and candy making, cream of tartar is commonly used as the acidulant, with typical amounts in the range of 0.15-0.25% of the sugar’s weight.[9] The use of cream of tartar imparts a honey-like flavor to the syrup.[8] After the inversion is completed, it may be neutralized with baking soda using a weight of 45% of the cream of tartar’s weight.”

after finding that it could be created easily I started adding lemon juice to my sugar solution and could play with the sugar as much as I wanted without crystallization, I then started to make the work.

I knew I wanted to work with the concept of materials and the relationship between the process and the work, I then started looking into where this concept would lead and looked at fetishism although interesting didn’t yield any ideas, but one thing did strike me about the concept it was something my tutor said about the whole idea “wood is only wood until you install an idea on it”. that stuck with me because it is the same with human beings a person is just a person until you impose an idea on to them.

this research lead me on to the conservation of mass “The law implies that mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form”

this then spurred me into looking at the circle of life of everything including the materials of my work, I wanted to continue working with elements found within the human body and sugar caught my attention because of its scientific properties the way it is clear when melted and the way it can be endlessly melted and retransformed into new projects.

ok so here goes, its been a while.

so recent news I successfully joined the ma course at my university, and so this begins again.

a quick recap on where I was and where I am going

I previously have been just focusing on what makes up the human body atomically predominantly working with charcoal and the idea that it doesn’t matter who you are were all made from the same things.
I have now moved on to looking at another material also found within the human body, sugar. I choose sugar because it is one of the few materials that you can turn into a piece of work and then back into usable sugar, this process interests me because it is scientific and also because the circle of process is important to my work.

the name suits the piece as vanitas is the latin name for vanity and my work is all about looking past that surface image and to what lies beneath.

for my assesment work i have layed out all the important experiments and pieces throughout the 3rd year.

including my small resin men and off cuts of resin experiments.

and so i belive this is it, the end , for now of this blogging process .

theres been ups and downs, tears and laughter, and just a few swearing matches thrown in :P

but over all its been good i feel my work has moved forward in leaps and bounds and my meaning has finally shone through.

so wish me luck…..

ive finally got round to peeling the resin of the silicon plastic and it came off beautifully, the resin was crystal clear and smooth as water.

i layed the larger pieces down underneath the hand, loosed the droplets and just shook them off around the main pools, it loks stunning the way the light captues each tiny drop.

i looked at putting a spot light on to the other fragmented resin piece but couldnt find anything sutiable when one of the technitions came up with the idea of putting a light inside of the plinth so i found a sutibale led light that was battery powered and drilled holes underneath the resin so the light shined up from underneath.

this solves the problem of not having enough light but too much with two strip lights.

for my bottle for the room that each of us personalise, i outlined the bottle in charcoal and filled the bottle with icing sugar so it stands stark next to the black.

i next had to come up with a name for the finished piece to tie the seperate sides of the room together and to give the audience a clue with what my work is about.

i have choosen the name ;

“Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas”

Transience of life, futility of vanity, the certainty of death.

this comes from the term vanitas

In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The Latin word means “vanity” and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. Ecclesiastes 1:2;12:8 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term.^[1] The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas.^{[Eccl. 1:2;12:8]} The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible. Vanity is used here in its older (especially pre-14th century) sense of “futility”.^[2] Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless is the rendering by The New International Version of the Bible.

Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life. Fruit, flowers and butterflies can be interpreted in the same way, and a peeled lemon, as well as accompanying seafood was, like life, attractive to look at, but bitter to taste. There is debate among art historians as to how much, and how seriously, the vanitas theme is implied in still-life paintings without explicit imagery such as a skull. As in much moralistic genre painting, the enjoyment evoked by the sensuous depiction of the subject is in a certain conflict with the moralistic message.

eloise corbett