Vanitas / Dead Growth
Juha Hilpas & Emilio Zamudio
Materials used: Bones, eggshells, seashells, acids, Aquarium, steamer, heating lamp.
Bones could be described as the
universal symbol of death. Died out, dried out and well, dead, bare bones hold
no living content in them anymore and in their fossilized state, not even traces
of living matter are present except for their form, taken over, substituted by
minerals.
In living
vertebrates bones are the support on which they grow. They carry the weight of
the living and as such constitute a great deal of the mass of an animal.
The details of the biochemical processes behind
bone formation are still
not fully understood, but mastering it
synthetically would eventually
allow us to construct self repairing building
materials and develop more
effective
bone replacements for medical use. We have focused on one aspect of bone
growth: the crystallization of tricalcium phosphate, the main mineral providing
bone tissue its rigidity.
We are combining nonliving matter
with the dead, to reanimate them in the process of crystal growth.
