Using Nature’s Natural Mirror
It’s been implied throughout several texts about the invention of mirrors, that nature herself was the first one to create such a contraption. So that animals and other living creatures alike can look at their own reflection when appearing in front of a stilled pond/lake.
This fascinating concept of using water as a mirror I believe is something I definitely want to use, or at least respond to in my creative poster utilising the Desire question. Since Desire and Mirrors are something that is constantly alluded to in popular culture - (see Mirror of Erised), I feel like what would be better than to recreate a look that harkens back to the good old days before time.
In this experiment, I played around with the reflective qualities of water, and left it in a bowl for sometime to make sure it’s completely still. It was very fascinating to see that it does reflect very well. Pictured Below: (You can see the light on my ceiling, so the reflective properties are quite high at a large surface area)
I also made ripples through it to see if it was capable of reflection at all if the water was disturbed. Pictured Below: (Distilled Water make really poor reflections indeed)
Even though the above produced a really poor reflection, it inspired me to do something different with my mirror concept for my poster. I knew for a fact that I couldn't create a water tight poster in the span of less than few days, but this influenced me to try to recreate that sort of rippled haze on a mirror, something which I know I will be capable of doing in a few days; but I don’t know how effective it’ll be, that will be explored in the next posts.
Sidenote: “a Water Tight Poster”?? What the heck is that you ask? Well, for my idea I wanted to do something with a poster that you have to interact with to see your own reflection, and the more you move the pieces the more distilled the water would be. Now whilst that’ll be a cool poster piece, I didn’t believe I could make something water-tight - so the idea was scrapped immediately, but after this experiment I feel like I could achieve something similar with just mirrors. All this is keeping in theme with the idea that what you seek (what you desire) is simply your own reflection - responding to the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter.