‘Cigarette smoking is injurious to heath’, this is what you would find written on almost every cigarette pack, but how many of us actually take it seriously and give up this bad habit. It is not only a threat for us humans, but also for the environment. If a motivation is all you need to give up on smoking, then David Havetta can do that for you. This Slovak artist quit smoking about 25 years ago, taking help form nicotine gum. But, his green effort did not end here, he recycled the chewed gums to create amazing artworks.
The nicotine gum that this 65-year-old artist discovered as a life-saving thing became the medium for his unique art. When he was trying to give up on smoking, he used to stick the chewed up pieces on a pen holder in his office. When the gums piled up to form a huge lump, he pressed it and noticed that it was a good, malleable material. To make some productive use of this material that was nothing more than waste to him, Havetta decided to try and sculpt them.
It was a woman’s head that gave the artist the initially start, then he went on to create a body for it. It took him a few months to create the woman’s body and as many as 500 pieces of nicotine gum went into sculpting the sculpture. Since he chews just one chewing gum a day, so he could make only a few dozen sculptures in the last twenty years. His creations include a horse, flowers and even an old table clock modeled after The Toilet of Venus by Diego Velasquez. Each of his pieces requires hundreds or even thousands of pieces of gum sometimes.
Via: OddityCentral