Overhead Projector

As I had loads of donated unused contact lenses I thought i would have a play around with them, as visual experiments into how I might display a collection of lenses If I found someone to collect used ones from. I first of all had to figure out what would happen when the lenses dried up, and whether they would interesting looking. The plastic is very different to the lenses I use so the results were new to me - they curled up a lot more, so that the edges became 'frilly'. I have  a number of different makes of lenses so i tested them all to see which ones looked the best. I discovered that if the lenses had little liquid on they just shrank in size without much change in shape and weren't all that visually interesting. however if I filled them with water (or solution) then they would dry with white residue/ crystallised solution. There is a curious consideration to be made over presenting found objects - although this was just a test, I wonder whether the integrity of the collection is compromised by consciously editing what the lenses will look like - curating how they deteriorate/age. 

I opened and dried 40 lenses with a view to show them on the overhead projector.

 I was pretty pleased with the result of the lenses shown on the projector. As the plastic is quite hard to see on opaque surfaces because of their transparency, showing them over light made them far more visible. There is also the option with displaying them in this way, of looking on the machine itself as well as at the projected image.

Unexpectedly, the lenses projected in prisms, so that the each had a rainbow coloured circle within it depending where the projector lens was focused. As with the carousel slide projector, the use of light and the projector lens is an important part of the work itself - the mechanism echoing some of the processes of vision.

I feel this work only really works if I can get hold of somebody's old daily contact lenses, so that it is a genuine log of the things they have seen. A museum display for these relics of their seeing. I don't really have enough time before the degree show to collect a substantial amount of lenses, which are proving tricky to source anyway, so perhaps this will have to be an ongoing project.