This project was created during my undergrad and took part in my college's exhibition about Narcissism. The prompt was "Me, Myself and I" and thus I decided to make something that would include myself in a literal way. My first thought was to make something big that grabs the attention of the viewer in a room, just like our ego would want us to grab the attention of many people. At the time, the torso was something we were exploring a lot through art history classes and so all these elements came together in my head and I decided to create a huge box of candy. The box's dimensions are H:2.06m L1.6m W: 70cm and the candy is made out of my own torso using plaster cloth.
The box is made out of wood, then covered from top to bottom with cardboard to give more of a "candy box" feeling and then I designed the exterior on Photoshop and had it custom printed. Later on, I carefully glued it on top of the cardboards and it was finished. Tors-o is written just like Jell-o, in the sense that the letter "o" is separated by the rest of the word. Even for the ingredients I included what you usually find in a candy box but I added words like "Narcissism" or "Self Concentrate" as a small detail.
The hardest part of the project was the candy and how I would actually create them. At first, I wanted them to be made out of actual jelly and so I started creating a cast of my torso out of cement which I would later fill with the mixture to create multiple torsos. Early on I realised that this would take ages and was really hard to achieve and I thought of liquid caramel that would become solid taking the shape of my torso. Again this was almost impossible since the caramel would get stuck on the cement and sometimes even a bit absorbed. Finally, I thought to use plaster cloth and later assemble the front and the back to create a full 360 torso. I painted the final dried torso's with spray in vivid colours that candies usually have.
sketch of the box
