Kainalu Miskella
Chocolate Jinu Head
Class of: 2029
Major: Architectural Design BFA
Medium: Sculpture, chocolate, perfomative
Faculty: Carol Peligian
Prompt: Create a head that represents us in some manner, almost like a self portrait or a portrait of someone that we choose. Prompt: Heads mean many things---they can be cultural, sexual and social identifiers, created as portraits, busts, totems, etc, etc, etc. We talked about the power of a piece expresses by pneuma, the feeling of breath and the internal pressure that creates a tension between what is to be and what is manifested or physically made. The head has a certain fellowship with nature, its perceptive orifices creating an instrument or opportunity in which our own personal human nature and that of the natural or elemental world are in dialogue.
For the head project, we were tasked with creating something that represented what was in our head, in other words, we needed to make a head that either was a representation of ourselves or of someone else who was important to us, and I began thinking about desserts. I decided to make this head out of chocolate and it is intended to look like Jinu from K-Pop Demon Hunters. I didn’t like the idea of eating a person’s head. It just felt wrong. But a fictional character would fill the requirement for the assignment, especially since K-Pop Demon Hunters was such a great movie and a big part of my, along with many of my friends’, summer. I started with a styrofoam head and plastalina to sculpt the Jinu head. I used foodsafe Sorta Clear rubber molding to cast the head, and plaster sheets to create a jacket to support the shape while the chocolate cooled. I melted Nestle chocolate chips in the microwave slowly and filled the inside of the mold with a thin layer in two parts. After it cooled, I put the two halves together using more chocolate as glue. This piece was performative and involved breaking the head and grabbing pieces of the chocolate.