Destructive Preservation and Dynamic Sculpture are a new collaboration with rocket scientist and explosives expert, Mark Grubelich. The philosophy is that temporal objects and events may be preserved in a more permanent form though the act of preservation causes their destruction.

Destructive Preservation:

Relatively short lived, typically organic-based, objects such as plants, fabrics and perhaps even pages from ancient manuscripts can be have their existence extended to the geological time scale via the appropriate application of high explosives. The result of the explosion is that the original object is vaporized but a three dimensional, high definition, imprint in a metal plate remains. In this manner, objects that are soon to cease to exist because of the march of time may continue to be observed for hundreds or thousands of more years.

We have begun experimenting with common plants in order to perfect the technique; the type and spatial orientation of the high explosive relative to the object is extremely critical. We refer to the Destructive Preservation of plant and animal matter as "Explosive Fossilization".

Future work will include fabrics; pieces of clothing worn by historical figures or flags flown during famous events; and raised manuscript texts. If the objects too far decayed to allow preservation by traditional methods, we can 'set them in stone'!

Former ferns preserved in copper plate. A US quarter dollar coin was included for comparison. The coin is merely  embedded whereas the organic matter has been vaporized, leaving a 3-D rendering of what was.

Dynamic Sculpture:

Dynamic Sculpture is created by the impact of metal in its fluid state with another object. The same explosive event both fluidizes the metal and propels the object of choice. The shape and form of the resulting object can be altered by the type of high explosive used as well as the relative spatial locations of the object and the metal. In this manner the 'state' of the object at that point in time is forever preserved by the metal which rapidly returns to the solid state.

Below are pictures of the "Copper Vagina" generated by the impact of a (full) miniature plastic liqior bottle with a copper plate.