Aerogel

 

Another spooky day in the Lab…Hard to imagine the Alfred Dunhill Golf Championship is behind this walls.

 

 

After two months of dwelling and pouring out liters of methanol and eye’s water,  I finally start building Aerogel. On the image is my first  dried sample using Super Critical Point Dryer [SCPD]. There is a little crack, but just look at the shadow of light, pure pleasure!

Things are going faster now. I am in the lab every day: the light is yellow, objects don’t cast shadows, we all look  like aliens to ourselves. I feel like a colorblind animal staring through the window to the yellow sky outside.

… the tenderness of the aerogel is what holding me here. Something one can touch only with eyes. It  is called BEAUTY.

I have been rather surprised to find out how much working with aerogel can resemble the process of slip cast ceramics technique. First you need a mould, well sealed and easy to assemble and disassemble as both ceramics and aerogel don’t like stress, tension, rocking and knocking; they might crack just from a breeze of a thin air.

Fragile and brittle, porous and highly hygroscopic equally hard to handle and make, they require knowledge and craftsmanship, love and imagination to reveal their glory.

The small samples of aerogel require an extension of all senses plus endless amount of patience. I became a day sleepwalker, clairvoyant, and finally a quirky beau seeker when look through the lenses at the miniature world I have created. All these attitudes, personally unique are experienced in solitude and hard to share in its depth.

I hope my images do it…

Frozen red fog, 2014

 

 

 

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