Callum East (UP680794)

Nursery Rhyme Project – Food Decay Experiment (Setup & Outcome)

After I discovered my desire to create an unsettling piece of work, I thought of many different ways of achieving this.

One of these was the use of Decaying Food

My

‘Spider Nest’, created from various pieces of unwanted food.

Along with my established use of sexual innuendo in my conceptual work, I also established that alongside sexual activity, food is one of the other common forms of human pleasure.

After making this discovery, I thought that messing around with that pleasure would work perfectly with my project, hence the use of decaying food came to mind.

To make this experiment more relatable to my project, I decided to create a model spider that could use this disgusting food (Greasy chips and beans, and a few wrappers for good measure) as its nest, the spider itself was made using bottle caps to form the head and body, I then wrapped pieces of scrap paper and leaflets around the caps to add more form to the spider, and finally added some more scraps to create it’s dangly legs. (An image of the spider is below, on the following page)

I chose to use this material because I always refer to leaflets I receive through our letterbox as “rubbish” and “disgusting”, a touch of personal irony I felt was quite clever.

Callum East (UP680794)

A photo of my spider. The twisted and bent legs make it feel more unnatural and painful

Finally after completing the spider, I placed it into its ‘nest’ and left it outside for 2 weeks. The combination of the decay and the natural elements would slowly make this nest more gruesome and horrifying.

The combination of the spider and its nest before the decay begins…

Callum East (UP680794)

And two weeks later, after the bacteria has settled in.

As you can see from these horrifying images, bacteria and mold had taken over the nest, even taking over parts of the spider itself.

These results gave me further ideas for concepts I could include in my work, such as brainwashing (From the bacteria covering the poor spider) and also provided me some disturbing imagery I could use in other areas of my project.