This project, titled -OSE, critiques the food industry’s practices and society’s attitudes towards sugar. The suffix “-ose” refers to various sugars (like glucose, fructose, and sucrose), which can be harmful when consumed excessively.
The project uses three sugar-made objects, symbolizing tools of addiction, displayed on silver platters. This serves as a metaphor for how the food industry promotes and facilitates sugar dependency. To create the sugar sculptures I developed a bespoke tool.
FIRST EXPERIMENTS
After brainstorming different paths I decided early on, to create sugar sculptures for this topic. In order to do this, I tried to repurpose a low-melt glue gun so I can melt the caramel when I need it. For the first tests I used the actual glue gun and modified it for my project.
Silicone mould
To test the glue gun I had to first recreate the glue sticks with sugar. For that I created silicone molds in which I would pour the caramel and wait for it to get rigid.
Sugar-sticks
I tested different cooking durations, recipes and cooling temperatures in order to get the best result.
First test
For the first experiments I used not properly caramelised sugar-sticks as I originally wanted the sculptures to have a light colour. While testing the sugar became opaque and didn’t hold it’s shape.
Second test
For the next experiment I only had caramelised sugar-sticks through which I found out that the keep the shape better and stay translucent. When using the caramel sugar-sticks I realised it has more of a glass like look than the lighter sugar-sticks.
The sugar-syringe
In order to get the desired outcome for the sculptures, I created a bespoke tool, the so-called “sugar-syringe”. Similar to a glue gun, the sugar/caramel inside is heated and can be used to create abstract shapes. The sugar-sticks are added by hand and pushed through with the thumb. The user can pause the process halfway through and then simply continue again and is therefore not bound to the usual short time until the sugar hardens.
The sculptures as presented in the Central Saint Martins’ graduate exhibition. In the exhibition I tried to visually explain the process and what the sculptures are made of.
