These plastic toy soldiers were created for the exhibition ‘Blanks In Between’ organised by Workshop for Potential Design. The exhibition theme relates to the material that exists before an object is fully formed when it is semi-formed, a ‘blank’. The process used to create the soldiers is a development of the Dug and Stuff projects shown previously at the exhibition ‘Objects with a Void’.

A rubber mould was made of a toy soldier. The mould is then excavated and recast in plastic. The excavation continues and each subsequent layer is cast again and again in sequence until the humanoid form is reduced to an amorphous blob.

For the exhibition, the soldiers were displayed reading from left to right, suggesting that the amorphous blobs are mutating into the humanoid forms, as though they are the embryonic ‘roughed out’ forms that lead to the final and complete more familiar soldiers, however this is actually the opposite.

In relation to the exhibition theme, the more humanoid soldiers are actually the blank material from which the final evolved blobs emerge.