Winter 2020 EditionAlumni & Friends Magazine
Medium meets machine
For this issue’s theme, Ohio Today searched OHIO’s Athens Campus for where and how tech is used. We found it in a most unexpected place.
Staff report | February 21, 2020
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The School of Art + Design in the College of Fine Arts harnesses 3D printing technology in the studio to “acknowledge the digital and then push it into new territories,” says Kevin Varney, the school’s digital fabrication technician and instructor. Artist Bri Murphy lays claim to this mandate within her area of study: ceramics.
Murphy, a graduate student in the College of Fine Arts’ nationally ranked ceramics program, pushed the tech-plus-art envelope by building a 3D printer from a model available through open source files on the web. She turned her photographs of a bust of Thomas Jefferson into code, manipulated that code to reflect her vision for the work, then fed it to the 3D printer to produce the piece, using clay as her “ink.”
The resulting bust is similar to several Murphy is producing for her graduate thesis exhibition, opening in April. The exhibition is grounded in an exploration of the purposeful collision of the digital, in the form of the 3D printer, with the analog, in the form of clay, and is “integral to current events…political happenings in our contemporary climate,” she says.
