Peter Lange (New Zealand)

I am sometimes curious about what would happen if you actually mixed chalk and cheese. Chalky cheese or cheesy chalk? Or it might start to bubble or expand or explode or turn blue. To brighten up a humdrum day, or a long car drive, or a hundred coffee mugs, consider what might happen when you make a teapot from chocolate (1994) or a boat from bricks (2002) or a kiln from ice (2004). What happens of course is that the finished work is next to useless as a functioning object but it will often work briefly, and in those few working moments it can produce the sort of delight and intrigue in the viewer normally provided by a magician or illusionist, except in these cases there is no sleight of hand, only a rarely observed combination of elements and conditions that our instincts tell us are not supposed to work together but, for a while, do. Or don’t, a lot of the time. Best to poke it and see anyway.