Body Hybrid, “Tiddies n Toes”

When first introduced to the body hybrid assignment, I immediately knew I wanted to do a surrealist piece. By combining body parts into a surreal composition, I wanted to create contrast between the surrealism of the final product and the detailed realism of the casts that it is composed of. Initially, I was drawn to the idea of developing a more erotic concept since the body, especially female, is often seen in a sexual context. However, I wanted to juxtapose this with disturbing surrealist effects to force viewers to recognize the body parts beyond their sexual aspects. My concept for this was inspired by the feeling you get when you see something so weird or disturbing, it for some reason makes you want to keep looking at it. The sexual aspect mirrors the feeling of being drawn in, while the disturbing combination of body parts creates the unsettling, nightmarish effect that simultaneously makes you want to look away.

Originally, I wanted to make several casts of my tongue and attach them to a cast of my torso, however my ideas changed a lot throughout the process of learning to work with the alginate and plaster. As it turns out, the tongue is an involuntary muscle, meaning I could not for the life of me hold mine still while creating a mold. I tried and failed 3 or 4 times before I decided that there were other things I could do that didn’t involve excessive drooling and live algae in my mouth (ew.) I began sketching new ideas and decided to attach extra toes instead because they have the same sort of gross, sort of unsettling effect that I wanted to achieve with the tongues. Significantly less sexual however, so I decided to add an extra boob. This also helped the balance of the piece because the mold of my torso had warped while casting, and was concave in the stomach and middle of chest area. I struggled a lot with learning the material; getting casts to the proper shape and attaching pieces to each other. For that reason, a lot of my piece was hand sculpted on rather than cast and attached. While still establishing an unsettling surrealism, my piece became slightly more abstracted and less realistic like I had first envisioned.

Once I finished the sculpting, I painted primary colors onto the niples and toes as accents to draw attention to the contrast of the two body parts. I also chose these colors to make the piece bold, which worked well with the theme of something disturbing being attention grabbing. I painted the nipple piercings and toe nails red to accentuate the sexual nature of the piece. Using blue and yellow on the nipples and then some of the toes, I aimed to emulate the feeling of nipples growing into toes, with blue at the tips and yellow at the base on both.

Overall, I’m happy with the finished product because it successfully captured feelings of uneasiness. However, I wish the execution had been cleaner and closer to the sketches I had originally, with more toes and more fat rolls folding over the toes.