Delicious, Daring, and Deadly Materials in Art
See how artists have used everything from eggs to soap and even poison to make their creations.
Lick and Lather (1993) by Janine Antoni National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Chocolate and soap
Plenty of artists have made self-portraits. But Janine Antoni took a unique approach in her work Lick and Lather . The Bahamian American artist cast 14 busts of herself from chocolate and soap.
Antoni licked the seven chocolate busts, gradually wiping away the chocolate to shape her features. She bathed with the soap busts, resulting in the same erasure. The two materials can be seen as reflections on desire (chocolate) and beauty (soap).
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878-1881) by Edgar Degas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Human hair
Some artists use materials to heighten a work’s sense of reality. French painter and sculptor Edgar Degas dressed his Little Dancer Aged Fourteen in a real cotton bodice, cotton and silk tutu, and linen slippers.
The locks were long assumed to be horsehair until our scientists studied a sample. Degas covered the hair (which he bought from a doll maker) in pigmented beeswax to meld with the rest of the sculpture.
This Little Dancer ( the only one the artist made himself ) is unique for its use of these unusual materials. For the rest of his wax sculptures of dancers, bathers, and horses, Degas made the hair out of wax.
Stains (1969) by Ed Ruscha (artist) and Heavy Industry Publications (publisher) National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Steak and gunpowder
In 1969 Ed Ruscha decided to conduct an experiment. The American artist felt sick of using paint. He wanted to explore how other wet materials soaked into, pooled on top, or otherwise responded to paper.
Ruscha made what he called a “laundry list” of 75 different substances that he wanted to apply to wove paper, from the juice of a T-bone steak and egg yolk to gunpowder and urine.
The stain from Los Angeles tap water is nearly invisible, while Worcestershire sauce made a brown splat across the paper. The final material Ruscha tested? Stain remover.
Cyanide
Many 19th-century photographs were made using a lethal substance—potassium cyanide. The poisonous compound is part of the wet collodion process, used to make ambrotype and tintype photographs.
Photographers coated a glass plate or metal sheet with collodion (a syrupy substance also used to bind wounds during the Civil War) and used silver nitrate to make it light sensitive. After exposing it to light in a camera, they developed the plate in an acidic solution.
Finally, they set it in potassium cyanide to “fix” the image.
This process was time-intensive and inconvenient. It required many materials, and photographers had to work quickly before they dried. It was also dangerous. Potassium cyanide can be lethal when ingested, and ether used in the collodion mixture is also harmful.
If a photographer made the mistake with any of these dangerous chemicals they could be gone before their photograph was even finished.
Farciennes I (Chemin d'Aiseau), Belgium (2007) by Witho Worms National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Coal
Dutch photographer Witho Worms makes pictures of landscapes using the very material he photographs. For his series Cette montagne c’est moi
(This mountain, that’s me)
Worms traveled around Europe photographing slag heaps—mounds of waste material produced by coal mining.
He collected coal from each site and ground it into pigments, which he then used to print his photographs.
This carbon-printing technique dates back to the 19th-century. It was favored by many photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, who valued the method for the beautiful range of dark tones it produced.
Worms chose the approach to raise questions about industrialization and its impact on our environment.
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