Honeycoma

                                     

People make art from waste all the time. Bottlecaps are a pretty type of waste, at least. 

I work in a bar and have done since I was a teenager. Throwing away bottlecaps was something I did on a daily basis. The idea only struck me mid-2016 that I should keep these and display them. Naturally, I sought the help of Google to reveal to me an idea surely arrived on the minds of others: bottlecap art. 

Online I saw some pretty cool pieces involving bottlecaps. Everybody seemed to either flatten them or use a grout or a resin to attach them to their desired surface, so I thought I'd shake it up a bit and try a new technique using materials perhaps a bit too classroom-friendly - push pins and glue. In my shed I found old cuts of what used to be our kitchen counter-top. Those, a rusty old hammer and a couple hundred bottlecaps completed my ingredients. I stared at them and felt like I was about to make a very unconventional and time-consuming cake; one that I had already decided would be named Honeycoma. No sweet pun intended.

1 - Laying it out. This stencil didn't help. I never saw it again. 

3 - I drew honeybcomb patterns but couldn't use them as proper outlines - they were never the right size!

2 -Began in a dirty workplace - the shed. For anyone thinking of doing something like this: think of your back. Source a table. 

4 - Deciding which bottlecaps to pair together was a fun part, but when I thought about their values it made me sad that this waste totaled up to more than I made that day - 24 bottlecaps at €63.00. 

5 - Pre-pinning isn't my thing. Too close together. I'll never get back those hours. 

6 - I had to scrape the inside of each bottlecap becuase the glue I decided to purchase just wasn't strong enough. This took aaaaages, but I felt giddy with each one that went on, so it was never too much of a trouble. 

7 - Slowly starting to take form

8 - I should probably work somewhere cleaner 

9 - Indoors! It really excited me at this stage, maybe that's the voodoo of primary colours.

10 - The final honeycomb

11 - The uneven surface created by pins

12 - The finished product. My intention is to remove the exposed bits of wood, but other than that c'est fini! Can you hear the psychedelic bees? Same.