House Of Wax Shrinks As It Melts Down Within Thirty Days

An unusual time-lapse video has emerged of the ‘A Pound Of Flesh For 50p’ known as the Melting House, which is an artistic installation at 40 Southwark Street, South London. The house, located near the site of an old candle factory, has been slowly melting for weeks after artist Alex Chinneck built it out of wax. However he had to introduce heaters after British weather proved too unpredictable.

This project was part of the Merge Festival and reportedly used 8,000 bricks cast in paraffin wax in beds of terracotta sand. The installation melted over the course of over a month after taking nearly a year to build. The artist collaborated with chemists, manufacturers and engineers to develop visually convincing bricks that manipulate in the most sculptural effective way with wax having makers, chemists and engineers involved in the project.

Artist Alex Chinneck constructed this full-sized, two-story wax house exhibit in London, a structure designed to melt over the course of 30 days. Watch the process yourself in this incredible time lapse video and be amazed!

As each individual volume drips down the building’s facade and the entire structure begins to warp in shape, the architecture becomes completely unrecognizable, only in a few weeks time, only the roof will remain on the floor, bathed in a pile of molten material. Each brick has been cast in paraffin wax within beds of terracotta sand, a method which renders both individuality and a unified color palette.

Alex Chinneck, born in 1984, is a British sculptor known for creating temporary public artworks. Most of Chinneck's installations feature across Greater London. His early works include Telling the Truth Through False Teeth (2012), where the artist used 1,248 pieces of glass to create 312 identically smashed windows across the derelict facade of a factory in Hackney, From the Knees of my Nose to the Belly of my Toes (2013) in Margate where Chinneck created the illusion that the entire facade of house had slid into the garden, and Under the Weather but Over the Moon (2013), a commercial property situated on Blackfriars Road created to look as if it had become completely inverted.

For his work in Hackney, local residents have described Chinneck as the "Banksy of Glass".

Credit: UpCycle.Club.