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Plymouth College of Art and Design   2007/2008

Charlie Murphy

My ‘kiss cast’ sculptures were originally inspired by my desire to visualise how differently people kiss - and to memorialise these moments in glass.

The ‘kiss-in’ event opened out what was originally a personal investigation into a very pubic investigation.I actively set out to engage my audience in direct physical and emotional participation, creating a pseudo dental / medical context for my social experiment.

By inviting a diverse range of people to donate their kisses to the project, I have created a unique survey of the kiss; recording both the sculptural forms of desire and all the intimate dialogues involved in this act through an epic video portrait.

Each mouth and way of kissing creates a unique expression of desire whose wet, writhing forms are delivered like a birth from their mouths.

The kisses are transformed through an elaborate indexical mould – making techniques where each kiss is suspended and framed as a negative space within a block.

The intricate languages of the kiss are scrutinized through the magnifying qualities of the glass to reveal an extraordinarily rich vocabulary of alien forms in silvery, medical detail.