ALEXIS BERNSTEIN ARTIST
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A Place You Feel Strong

Maggots are Gross and other discoveries about working with bones.

9/23/2016

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Well, My "update blog on Wednesday's" failed but I swear it's because I've been busy. 

First order of business, did you know that fly's like to lay their eggs in bone marrow?
​ I didn't, until I was cleaning off some bones and all of a sudden maggots were crawling out of them. I put larger bones back in a trash can to continue natural cleaning and took a risk with some smaller bones to start printing....But they still had maggots in them. Maggots resistant to hydrogen peroxide, and cyanotype chemicals, and indigo dye. 
​
Picture
First Cyanotype Attempt
Picture
Maggots
Second on the agenda, cyanotyping bones is going to be a bit more work than I hoped for. I discovered that bones are super porous, therefore soak up the cyanotype chemical really quickly. When I tried to expose an image onto the bone chips, The chemical was deep in the bone, so the exposed area was very blurry. When I tried to rinse out the test bones, the unexposed chemical (yellow in the picture) wouldn't leave the bone because of how quickly it had soaked in.

To remedy this, Scott suggested using a gelatin coat on the bones to prevent chemicals from soaking into the bone itself. Gelatin has been used in photography for a very long time to hold light sensitive chemicals on paper so I am hopeful that it will help remedy my exposure issues.
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Pictures of Macerating Bones

9/23/2016

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Picture
Left: Bones first day Macerating. Middle: 2 weeks Macerating. Right: Bones after dumping out water.
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  • Artwork
    • Changing Anthropogenic Intention
    • Cyanotype Bones
    • Life and Light
    • Photography
    • Surgeon General's Warning
  • Artist Statement
  • CV
  • Blog
  • Shop