When the artist Miriam Slaats visited a factory that uses injection-moulding machines, she became instantly enamoured with the plastic material that remained after the manufacturing process. Her conclusion was that these tangles of polyester, polypropylene and polystyrene originate from the same raw material, namely oil. It later constituted the foundation for her BLOB ART and its related credo: OIL FOREVER.

Heating the plastic materials to very high temperatures creates a fluid mass that solidifies quickly while cooling down. During the time span in which the substance transforms from liquid to a mass, Slaats processes it into BLOB ART. She expressively calls this momentum ‘a personal symbiosis of freedom and coincident’, because it always forces her to enter a creative process based on her initial intuition. BLOB ART is the foundation for two types of art objects created by Slaats. The physically large art expressions of BLOBART fall under the denominator of 3D MONUMENTAL BLOB ART, while ASSEMBLAGE covers the small BLOB objects. The latter objects are more specifically ensembles of poly-materials mixed with other raw materials, such as stone and metal, but also lost-and-found objects. Here the concept of the artist is that plastic as a base material is something created while an object that’s found has its own history. By connecting these opposites to each other, she creates food for thought for the observer. The all-encompassing credo, BLOB / Oil Forever, stands for the strength of the base material in all BLOB ART and to Slaats’ philosophy about oil.

Writer Huib Afman