IDEA/ARST 270 - Product Design I
Salt Brick
An exercise in convexity and concavity
Ideation
I began by molding plastilina, an oil based clay that does not dry out, and experimenting with different forms, letting the material naturally mold itself the way it wanted to. This left me with 5 unique shapes, all of which worked within the dimensions of the salt brick. I then picked my three favorite shapes and created scaled up newsprint drawings of them.
Finding Form
The Klein Bottle
This infinite loop is the shape I ultimately chose to carve out of my salt brick. Although not intentionally, it looks very much like a klein bottle, an important mathematical concept in which a shape contains no inside or outside, and is all one surface.
The Tooth
This form reminded me somewhat of a pulled tooth, the cuts in the side appear somewhat like bite marks as well, adding to the toothlike aesthetic
Bubbles
Here, I created mass by stacking multiple spheres atop one another, smoothing out some areas where they touched and leaving others harsh and raw.
Tools and methods
Reference Model
Before I started carving the actual salt brick, i wanted to sculpt a to-scale model so i would have a reference during the carving process, and so that I better understood where the mass in the form was. I used a massive block of plastilina to make this model, using various clay carving tools and shapers.
For the salt brick, I used a dremel and hand sanders to mold my convex/concave shape. This process took over 4 hours.
Carving Process
This was when I first saw just how close I was to connecting my holes through the middle of the salt brick. Though it was difficult to sand, the material as a hole is very fragile, and easily susceptible to cracking or breaking. At first, I didn't understand why the salt was yellow on the inside, until I realized it was the light shining through, informing me I only had a little more left to carve out before the hole was complete.
The dremel caused salt particles to fly everywhere, and I had the good foresight to set up my carving station outside so I would not create a complete mess.
