Dylan Martinez — Swedish Fish Water Bags For Sale

The Swedish Fish Water Bags take everything Martinez does with his water bag sculptures and add one more thing to disbelieve. A plastic bag, filled with water, tied at the top and completely convincing in glass. Then, inside it, Swedish Fish. The candy sits at the bottom the way it would if you'd actually dropped a handful in. Red, suspended, completely still.

Each piece is hot sculpted, sandblasted, and acid etched by hand. The process is the same as his water bag work, but the subject does something different. The water bag alone is about illusion and material. The Swedish Fish inside it are about memory. The technique is more demanding than it looks. Getting the candy forms to read correctly inside the illusion of water, inside the illusion of plastic, requires everything he has built over years of practice.