moontray

Having made an ashtray inspired by the shape of the sun, I now wanted to create a matching moon-shaped one. While planning the solar ashtray a year ago, I intended to make two right away, but I wasn't really satisfied with the result, so I only made one. It has been on my to-do list ever since, and I have finally redesigned the shape and moved on to making this prototype. I decided to use the silhouette of a crescent moon, with the dark sun being the space where the ash collects. The part of the moon that you can see is the elevated border. It's not possible to move the moon in front of the sun astronomically, but it's still an abstraction of the concept itself. Now, a word on the choice of material. The solar ashtray was milled from a single aluminium plate, which is rather heavy and cold, but gives this beautiful metallic look that I really appreciate. Steel or aluminium would have been my first choice for this as well, but I didn't have the machines available to manufacture something this rigid. My chosen material is a dense polyurethane/aluminium mix that is somewhere between pine wood and common aluminium in density. It has a homogenous surface, is not too light (so it doesn't just fly away) and is easy to manufacture. I wanted to experiment with this artificial material for this project and realised that the sound an object makes is also something to consider during the material selection process. I still don't smoke, by the way.