Melding

Mold-Making | Wax Casting | Film

This piece is the culmination of months worth of explorations around the power of community. Through various studies, I explored the beauty of strong communities and the challenges and pitfalls of being part of a group for an extended period, with gated communities being an extreme example of that.

I was particularly drawn to the idea of conformity and identity loss that can occur when we become deeply embedded in social groups.

This installation represents this identity loss, the “melding” over time. The wax faces are representations of individuality, eventually starting to lose definition by melting into one uniform mass of wax. Depending on the material’s thickness - one’s individual integrity and sense of self - some faces melt faster than others, and some manage to remain intact.