Bathsheba Grossman

[cotya]

http://bathsheba.com/

   
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I'm a designer for 3D printing, here are some sculptures and math models. In sizes from jewelry to handheld sculpture, they're a mix of geometry, computation and hand drawing.

I'm an artist exploring the region between art and mathematics.  My work is about life in three dimensions: working with symmetry and balance, getting from the origin to infinity, and always finding beauty in geometry.

how it's done

...I was born in 1966 in the US. After receiving a degree in mathematics from Yale, I changed course to study art at the University of Pennsylvania, specifically sculptural principles and metalworking under Erwin Hauer and Robert Engman: two mathematical sculptors who were both trained by the eminent artist and Bauhaus teacher, Josef Albers.  

After several years’ experience making bronze sculptures by traditional methods, I switched to CAD/CAM and began designing digitally for production by 3D printing. Since then I have been creating pieces using many technologies including: lost-wax casting, electroforming, and stereolithography. My work is about exploring the region between art and mathematics. It is about life in three dimensions and always finding the beauty in geometry.

Apparently I've studied more math than most artists.  I don't use it very directly – I wouldn't call myself a mathematician, and most of my designs are drawn rather than computed – but it's plain that my creative engine is interested in this.

I like technology.  3D printing in metal is my main medium now, and I also work with subsurface laser damage in glass.  This isn't because I love gadgets, it's much more trouble to do this than to use the mature tech that most sculptors enjoy.  I do it because the shapes I have in mind aren't moldable, and I want to make a lot of them.  Those two constraints, taken together, turn out to be remarkably constraining: most traditional sculpture technology simply doesn't operate on un-moldable objects.

...That said, most people's next question is "So, is this your real job?"  At present I'm happy to say that it is.  It took me about ten years from art school to make a dollar, during which I worked as a programmer, teacher, tech writer, typist, web designer, etc., while making sculpture by hand as best I could.  In the last years of the 20th century, 3D printing was developed to a level that could do my work, and then, quite suddenly, I began to be an artist. 

http://i.materialise.com/ -- i.materialise is a 3D printing service for everybody with an eye for design and a head full of ideas.