Just in time for Halloween, here's a house creepily melting in the middle of London.
As part of the 2014 MERGE Festival in the city's Bankside district, artist Alex Chinneck -- famous for his four-story "sliding house" in Margate, Kent -- built a two-story house sculpture out of 8,000 wax bricks. The festival kicked off on Sept. 18, and the edifice has been melting ever since. What once looked like a pretty, sturdy home has become a grotesque, warped version of itself. But that's all part of the plan.
Chinneck is actually speeding along the melting process with a heating tool. By the end of the festival, the sculpture, titled "A Pound Of Flesh For 50p," will be a mound of wax drippings.
Design Boom has more details on the project's construction and gradual deconstruction:
each brick has been cast in paraffin wax within beds of terracotta sand, a method which renders both individuality and a unified color palette. over the last year, the artist has collaborated with chemists, manufacturers and engineers to develop visually convincing bricks that manipulate in the most sculptural effective way. melted manually, the house softens through the use of a handheld heating apparatus — commonly used in roofing applications — providing creative control over the artwork’s appearance and duration.
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Before You Go
Spirits in Residence: The "Unsinkable Molly Brown," famous for successfully escaping the Titanic, and her husband, J.J.
Spook Sightings: Visitors to the home, which is now a museum, have reportedly spotted a woman in Victorian dress rearranging chairs at the dining room table and caught whiffs of J.J.'s pipe and cigar smoke. And every October, the security system goes on the fritz.
Spirits in Residence: At least one of the five Wilkinson sisters (who all lived in the home) and "a man hiding in the attic"; caretakers think he may be a Confederate Civil War deserter.
Spook Sightings: In 1999, after standing empty for some 30 years, the 22-room home opened as a museum, where repairmen say they've seen female figures sleeping in beds and waving from windows and heard doors closing in empty rooms.
Spirits in Residence: The inhabitants of the tribal burial ground lying beneath part of this 444-acre estate, once home to farm-machinery magnate Charles Deering and now a cultural center.
Spook Sightings: One ghost hunter claims she recorded 60 paranormal voices on the property; other visitors say they've heard drums, glimpsed a woman motioning for help at the boat basin and seen furniture shift. And a visitor wrote a poem here, with phrases that mirrored those in Deering's personal journals.