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A Ceramicist Sculpted the 656 Bars of Soap You'll Use in Your Lifetime

These incredibly realistic porcelain soaps wouldn't look out of place in your grandmother's bathroom.
All images courtesy of Honor Freeman

While researching ideas for a solo exhibition at Adelaide’s JamFactory gallery space, ceramicist Honor Freeman came across the internet claim that over one lifetime, the average person will use 656 bars of soap. It became the starting point for her eerily realistic collection of porcelain replica soaps, slip cast from real half-used bars she asked her friends, family and workmates to send her.

“My work for some time has been concerned with noticing and quietly commemorating the smaller moments that are a constant rhythm of the everyday,” Freeman tells The Creators Project. “I seek to make visible the relationship between the objects we use and ourselves, the gestures, mundane activities and humble objects—like small markers silently measuring the hours and marking the days.”

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She created the series using a slip casting method, which involves using the actual bars of soap to create moulds, and pouring plaster into the soap-shaped cavity. She then coloured them using a staining method, experimenting with different combinations to produce an authentic pastel colour palette. In order to create a slippery, soap-like effect, the artist sanded down the pieces to make them as smooth as possible.

“The work interacts with ideas of liquid made solid due to the processes of making that are fundamental when working with clay,” she says. “The porcelain casts become echoes of the original object, the liquid slip becoming solid and forming a memory of a past form…small moments caught and made solid as if frozen in time.”

Porcelain proved the perfect medium for soap. “[It] has the curious ability to mimic other materials and surfaces almost perfectly, it subtly shifts the object imbuing it with some kind of otherness and magic,” she says.

The artist is not entirely sure what makes bars of soap so compelling, but it might be their ordinariness. “Soaps are such humble and intimate objects,” she says. “A reflection of their use and user.”

There’s also an element of nostalgia that draws you in. The image of a half-used bar of soap languishing in a shower box is something nearly everyone can relate to. “Many people have responded with memories of seeing old gnarled soap sliver stacks at grandparents homes,” the artist relates. We bet they weren’t quite as ornately beautiful as these ones.

You can follow Honor Freeman here and learn more about the exhibition here.

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