Tinned Food

This piece is inspired by the tinned fish industry from Portugal. When you visit Lisbon it is hard not to notice the many shops that sell tinned fish. In these tins you can find not only Sardines but many other types of seafood - Mackerel, Cod, Tuna or Octopus to name a few.

The image of these shops is something that has followed me over the years and it was an easy choice to bring a sardine tin to the class.

Casting the tin had some ups and downs, and only on my second attempt I was able to cast a perfect tin. The lid was casted as a Sprig mold. It has to be done this way to make sure the plaster wasn’t stuck in inlays and to make sure all the important details of the tin were well casted.

After that I tried to play not only with the object, but also with the concept of it.
I cut a few tins and mix and match to come up with different shapes and I thought that a square tin was a nice and unexpected shape.
So while it’s obvious that a normal rectangular tin will hold Fish, I was interested in adding different objects to the square tins, as a surprise when you open them.

After that I thought: what if we could have a meal only from tinned food? As if they were tapas or in portuguese: petiscos.

Enjoy this meal!