Plastic Cutlery Lighting Design Exploration
March 2018
Materials - Plastic
Circular plastic - Diameter 16 inches
Final Piece: Diameter 7 inches X H19 inches
This is an exploration of plastic cutlery with light and how it interacts with each other. I was exploring the possibilities of layering as well as how different sides of the plastic bends the light around. Using a variety of equipment such as a heat gun, and an oven to heat and melt the plastic into wild forms. I was exploring different techniques as well as usage of common items into a more decorative item
The first project I used a heat gun and applied direct heat on to the areas that I desire though because of that there were problems in the heating process such as thinning out the material or cracking. The light inside this project is an incandescent light bulb. The quality of light is disperse and is friendly to look at due to the amount of layering. It was meant to be chaotic but was still able to tell what this project was all about as i moved from a more dense object to something more recognizable. I imagine this to be on a wall as it's diameter was 11 inches.
The second project was extremely experimental and had only one iteration and so there was a lot more planning in what went in before doing it as I had planned to use the oven as my method of production. My control became more of a guiding control as I could not control the tools that were being misinformed from the oven. There were many things I did not consider and one of the was that the cutlery would shrink about half the size. I also realize or figured new ways to play with the plastic. This lamp used an LED light at the center. The way I did this was taking a 1/4" acrylic sheet into an oven of 350 degrees Fahrenheit and waited for about 30-40 minutes and placed the plastic cutlery ontop of it and judged its melting point every 5 minutes. When the plastic is close to even to the surface I would then place a 0.003 PETG sheet on top of it which acts as a lamination sealing the plastics together. However this sheet would act as an adhesive sticking to practically everything and I use that sheet that overflowed to the sides to join the pieces together.
The Final project was an accumulation of these two projects together and would have loved to make a giant pillar of this as a light having both LEDs on both sides. However I am limited to the size of the oven as well as the budget and so what I made was a miniature version of this idea but as a pendant lamp. I wanted to go for a more frozen appearance or a trapped like fortress of this tools as they were falling down. The edge lighting using LED gave the appearance that I was aiming for and played a lot of its color until I found the frozen that I was aiming for.
I consider this project fun but difficult to manage as many of the times it was just better to allow the plastic follow its desire or guide it via gravity. There were a lot of special moments within each movement. The only thing I can really be sad but also proud is tha tit can only be done in a single take and whatever happens happens and there was little to redo as the project sealed itself up especially when rolled into a cylinder.
The first process in which involved a heat gun that was controlled but layers of chaotic movement
The second project involved using an oven to heat an acyrilic sheet along with plastic cutlery that then bends into a cylinder
Some of my experiments and tests to see what I could do with this medium and learning what I could and couldn't do
This is my final outcome from the experiments (though I have forgotten to take an image of it in a more proper setting)
