Ever since I noticed that I needed to express a message, I was looking for a form in which I could preserve my freaky colourful style AND telling my message about how we value things and the role of big corporations in it. So I have been focussing on the food industry. We all know food is one of the most important things we buy in life, perhaps THE most important and yet we are so careless in how we judge what we eat.
To express more with my work I have been mapping other 'dimensions' of art to use in expressing my message. Normally you start with creating the story with anything that you can use to make it visually happen. But I already had a list of demands visually and that the message shouldn't interfere with it.
So by using particular materials for my artwork I manage to send a message just by using different materials. I started with bones, which was a coincidence and soon discovered it ticked the right boxes around food (dead food source) and our mindless following (sheep). Examples are invasive species and Eco orange http://www.imsobo.com/exit.html. But still it was a bit far fetched and unclear. It was more about expressing the beauty of nature (bones and stones) in contrast to the artificial (clay/resin/manmade).
So I started using plastics to express the waste and the use of artificial food sources. That in itself had similar impact. So I combined the two and that was a bit of a search because my main base material to create, clay, suddenly only worked as an adhesive. I had to rethink how to keep my style without making the right shapes with clay. I eventually worked it out by using an earlier used technique for mosaic, like in 'Bad Enamel' http://www.imsobo.com/trail.html. And combining that with the use of other plastic materials like in 'Eye Lid' and 'Sugar Ray rabbit'. Eventually resulting in: Mr. Clean http://www.imsobo.com/trail.html
But Mr. Clean was quite a lot of work and a very fragile piece.
In a parallel thought process I created fridge magnets, where I used what I did with Delft blue ceramic paint style and plastic mosaic, but on bone. Why? The other dimension I wanted to use to express my message was 'location'. What better place to express your message about food than on a fridge?
Soon after the first magnets, I wanted to create fridge magnet sculptures. I did, but the space is limited and I didn't want them to stick out a lot. http://www.imsobo.com/fridgemagnets.html
Now I have fused where I left Mr. Clean with where I was with fridge magnets and came up with this strong combination, 'Incorporated':
