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Bartender: Rough morning?

My transformation of an ordinary box involved recreation of a new form, through the experimental process of destruction and reconstruction. My final work produced vessels made from ‘cardboard pulp’, a combination of the corrugated cardboard of a storage box with PVA glue and boiled linseed oil.

Before starting my project, I looked around my house to be shocked at the amount of boxes we have; boxes for storage filled with unused items. Containers for the unwanted material things we buy and neglect everyday. 

My lengthy process started by tearing and stripping down the box, similar to how millions of tree trunks are harvested and stripped of their limbs to be sent to pulp mills. This was expressive, my destruction of excessive materialism and mass-production that these storage boxes represent. Soaking the pieces of cardboard overnight was like a process of rebirth. The brown sludgy mixture that formed was reminiscent of mud and soil. 

Over days of hand-squeezing the moisture out and attempts of sculpting, a plaster mixer drill attachment finally allowed me to create a finer mixture with which I moulded three vessels (a cylinder, a hemisphere and a rectangular prism).