Chewed gum is an irritant mostly found on the bottoms of shoes and the undersides of tables. But through the lens of printmaker and photographer Michael Massaia, chewed gum is a beautiful medium for semi-abstracted sculpture. “All of the images are created from a single piece of chewed gum,” Massaia writes of his process. “I mold all the shapes by using my hand, tongue, and teeth… After I mold them, I mount them onto black plexiglass (or face mount them to regular glass), and photograph the sculpture using either a Creo scanner or a large format camera.”
Broken Heart
He doesn’t sculpt the gum digitally or colorize it, though he does use high-contrast prints that intensify their colors and texture.It was during an idle gum-chewing session that Massaia realized that bubblegum had the potential to look disarmingly organic. “One night I was sitting around, chewing gum, and blowing bubbles. For some reason I removed a blown intact bubble from my mouth, shaped like a human heart, and looked at it on a light box. I was so amazed by how much it looked like actual organ tissue,” he tells The Creators Project. “The depth, and complexity of the textures was way beyond anything I could have imagined.”
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He adds, “By combining this new medium with photography, I felt as if a whole new world was open to me courtesy of Hubba Bubba.”
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