Gooey Images of Rebecca Storm’s Slime Covered World

Bonding over our common love for skating, art, fashion and cool, weird shit, VICE and Vans partnered to launch Unbound—a new series that enables emerging Canadian creatives to work on what they love.

Slime is hard to pin down. Shifting shapes, textures and colours, this barely identifiable substance can take on the form of tepid sauce sitting under the red glow of buffet lamps for eternity, horrifying ooze that falls out of your body, or the unknown smear that awaits your touch every time you sit down on public transit. Often it's just the disturbing mystery of what kind of slime you're encountering that makes it so unsettling. C'mon slime, what is your deal really? These are the kind of questions that Rebecca Storm's new photo series brings to mind. Continuing her penchant for beautifully blending the garish with the mundane, these images study the strangeness of slime by placing it in even stranger situations. After looking at them we had to send Rebecca a few questions, because slime.

What first drew you to slime? When did this series begin?
I think most of my work is pretty heavily informed by ASMR and synesthesia, so slime is a pretty natural progression from that. Aesthetically speaking, I'm intrigued by odd textures and excretions, and how the natural inclination is to classify those things as "gross"—I find slime to be quite beautiful. It's malleable, resilient, evolving, it's such an interesting substance.

What things do you categorize as slime? What attracts you to them?
Well there's slime I make, which is the kind of slime that's been trending lately. Most of the stuff for sale on Instagram always seems to be inspired by food which seems counterintuitive to me. I like organic colors and no smell if possible. Besides that I feel like humans can be pretty slimy, figuratively and literally, so it's interesting to explore that metaphor. A big part of decay is slime—which is also a big part of birth. Slime is everywhere!

What did you cast as slime for this project?
Mostly slime from decay or slime I made… and some secret sources.

Why do you think slime gets a bad rep?
I think some people find it repulsive because it's cold and sticky, and if you don't know how to handle it, it can be impossible to get it off of your hands. Nobody likes to be controlled by anything, let alone by a substance they don't understand.

Any dream slime you'd like to work with in the future?
I've never mastered fishbowl slime, so I'd like to explore that. A couple online slime shops sell slimes that seem as though they'd be incredibly satisfying to work with.

Slime shops? How did you find out these exist?
I sort of stumbled across them accidentally when I was looking through ASMR videos. This one is one of my favorites, although I've never actually purchased slime since nobody ships to Canada—I usually just make it myself. A lot of these shops are actually run by 11 year olds and marketed to a similar demographic I think.

What's the best/worst thing about working with slime?
Aesthetically it's a very beautiful substance, but it's difficult to control. It doesn't keep its shape very well, so it's difficult to compose a still-life scene and then photograph it seamlessly. Slime has a mind of its own.

Follow Rebecca Storm on Instagram.