Clean Chimney, 2018/19
hand made soap, 200 x 46 cm
production: author, original mold designed by Noumenon
photos: Ivan Zupanc, artist
CLEAN CHIMNEY is another sculpture from the Clean Sculptures series made of home-made soap. Sculptures are ivory white, fragile and they smell of lavender. Ten years ago artist discovered his grandmother’s recipe for making natural soap. Grandmother Milka was a nice, simple but tough woman living in a small Serbian village Lipolist. She was using this kind of soap for most of her life for bathing, washing hands, clothes, dishes… Recipe is very simple: 2/3 of grease and 1/3 of strong base with a splash of essential oil. Process of making the soap is hard, messy and demanding. You need right amounts, right temperature, timing, molds. Yet, it’s fun and the result is beautiful. We all discovered lately how this cheap and simple human invention is actually valuable. It was saving human lives for centuries and it is doing it again. Nikolić used it to build simple architectural shapes such as a wall and a factory tower.