Before I Throw Them Away

31.05.2026

Experiments all failed, but that was fun

A couple of years ago I was struck by the idea that you can make your own material things. I mean not utilitarian things like clothes or furniture, but something completely from your imagination. My obsessions that year were concrete and resin. I made a lot of test stuff (cubes!) trying to find ways to get the results I want, but I mostly failed. I didn’t have the right knowledge and tools (and I still don’t have), but when you start something unusual you don’t know what you need, and you have to find out.

This lack of knowledge was partly intended: I always tended to overprepare, to learn all about something instead of doing things, so this time I decided to reverse the process: start by doing, discover what you miss (skills, tools, materials) and then obtain it. That may be not very effective way of getting results, but it’s a great way to overcome perfectionism and to grow tolerance for mistakes that in the end leads to more results.

At the moment I have to get rid of these test cubes, but I want to preserve experience and lessons they teach me somewhere, and why not here? That was the one of the first attempts to connect concrete with resin. It was nice at first, but several weeks after the concrete and resin parts fell apart:

I learned the lesson and in the next test used some kind of armature (hard wire) to connect two concrete parts. You can’t see it because the resin layer is not transparent, and I still don’t know how to solve this problem with transparent resin. By the way, it’s not transparent because of fluorescent powder and emits light in the dark!

Here you can see another problem: the bottom concrete layer cracks near the armature

My idée fixe was to create a crack in concrete full of resin, I tried different approaches, nothing worked for me, but I plan to come back to the problem and find the solution.

The first test was horizontal, but there was a leak of resin and the result is quite ugly

Here I used sticky tape to create a chamber for the resin

Here I added a wooden box to keep everything together, and it's almost perfect except the resin shrinks while curing, so the top surface caved inward into the crack

I was impressed by Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books and here I tried to reproduce a look of an ancient reptile from the concrete, but it turned out that concrete is not very suitable for forming small details like eyelids:

There were simple tests where I tried to use some filler just to see what happens:

The main problem here was how to fix the top part (already cured) while the bottom part is still curing

This one is really simple: concrete layer with armature, then layer of beads, then final concrete layer

And the last thing I want to share is this resin-only cube. I wanted to test two things:

Is it possible to make borders between resin layers invisible? (I didn’t succeed)
What would happen to a tangerine inside resin? (Nothing)

Although none of these experiments succeeded, I had a lot of fun playing with them, and there are tons of ideas that popped up while doing so!