Kingston University graduate Xiaoli Wen has created a series of porcelain bottles shaped by a waterfall.
Called Water-Shaped Bottles, the project involved designer making silicone rubber moulds of discarded plastic and glass bottles.
The moulds were filled with plaster and allowed to cure while hanging under flowing water.
These casts were used to slip-cast the final bottles in porcelain.
Here's some text from the designer:
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WATER-SHAPED BOTTLES -CHANGE OR BE CHANGED?
By XIAOLI WEN
Water does not have its own shape. It is shaped by its container. Now water wants to change the container’s shape therefore to decide its shape by itself. It is a philosophical thinking about active or passive, change or be changed.
This project allows water, in this case ‘river’, to act as a creative force to change the liquid container’s shape.
A small number of bottles were selected which people casually discarded into rivers – bottles of mineral water, Coca-Cola, beer, whisky and gin. Trial and error in the river let a process evolve whereby these discarded bottles could be poetically represented to show the spirit of the river upon them.
The final objects could be new bottles with corks or vases made by porcelain. When we pour water into the new containers, the water inside is shaped by water itself.
The process:
- Chose original bottles.
- Covered the bottles with thin layer of clay.
- Made 2-part plaster mould from the bottles covered with clay.
- Poured silicone rubber into plaster mould with bottles inside.
- Demoulded and got silicone rubber moulds which are flexible.
- Poured plaster into the flexible mould.
- Sealed the flexible mould.
- Put the mould into fishing net.
- Hanged the fishing net into waterfall.
- Kept holding the net for half an hour.
- Waited until the plaster dried.
- Demoulded and got shaped plaster mould.
- Remade new mould by shaped plaster mould.
- Slip cast porcelain bottles.
- Final objects.