After putting out a call last term for old lenses and getting a big response, but mostly of people giving me out of date but unused daily contacts, I have a big supply of them that I can make something from. I would have preferred used ones because it means that someone has seen through them, which is more poetic... but the new ones give me an opportunity to play around with them and find out how they work. My lenses are different to these ones as I use them for much longer periods of time.
I spent an evening in the studio just experimenting with the daily lenses...watching them shrink and warp as they dried out. Happily, they look really cool when they are dried as the edges crimp and go all wavy - this is good for if I want to display them or photograph them. I've had an idea that I'd like to make a collection of these and display them as a mass - a pair for every day of a whole year maybe. As it would be very tricky to get hold of someone who would give me their old lenses, and I don't have time left on my course to collect them (!!) I would have to make it up. I'm never sure how I feel about this kind of thing because my work is usually trying to point out the truth, but perhaps if no one knows then it is acceptable.
Another idea to follow this up is to photograph this sort of collection in order to make slides. I am pleased with the slides of my lenses that I have made but I only have about 10 pairs, therefore 20 photos, which doesn't fill the carousel slide projector at all. It would be far easier to find 80 of these lenses by using the ones I've been given.
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