Detail from recent experiments in 3d. Collective intelligence, AI, and Elon Musk have been on my mind lately. This image was made possible by a wealth of information and tools that are free for anyone with an Internet connection, notably Blender, Andrew Price aka “Blender Guru” videos on YouTube, and models available under the Creative Commons license (butterfly by Kirin Karpenko and LEDs by Sonny See, both available on Blendswap). Although not free, Julius Harling’s incredible Graswald also deserves mention. #creativecommonslicense
blender
Female Northern Cardinal /
Chickadee and sparrow /
I continue to model and assemble paper birds for a large sculptural rendition of my winter feeder. Here’s a chickadee and sparrow. The birds
modeled bluejay /
Bluejay for a work in progress, February 2019. Papercraft.
making nature from paper /
Details of work in progress, February 2019. I modeled the objects in CAD software, unfolded the mesh, print patterns on paper, and reassembled them. This is all an exercise to go from nature into my computer and back out again. My conclusion thus far: it is very hard to make nature with a computer.
cardinal with modeling /
Male Northern Cardinal with partial modeling, 2019
Technology infiltrates nature meanwhile humans inhabit progressively virtual realities. Like this one.
Papercraft tree WIP /
I continue to work on my latest Electrolier sculpture. For this part --an arboreal vignette (and habitat for electric creatures of the Virginian night)-- I designed a sculptural tree in Blender that I unwrapped, print, cut, and folded to make branches out of relatively thin paper. I used this first collection of paper branches to build an underlying structure for my sculpture, like a naked tree. I stabilized it with wood glue and expandable foam. At the moment I am applying a bark layer which I laser cut out of cardboard using the same sequence of branch patterns. Because I am layering identical patterns, and because the real world is imperfect, the bark does not wrap around the circumference of the underlying tree exactly. I fill occasional gaps in the bark by hand, which gives an organic feeling to the machine aesthetic.
Whoever believes that technology makes production easier or faster has not witnessed my painstaking practice to balance artist and computer, nature and machine. For more information on process, please refer to my earlier blog entry: https://www.kellyheatonstudio.com/blog/2018/8/1/modeling-tree-branches
Below are several images of my process thus far. Note that this is the first of two interlocking branches.
Chicken slaughter /
Yesterday, fifteen of our chickens were slaughtered while I was away. I found piles of feathers all through the fields and two dead bodies but the rest were gone. A pack of coyotes must have attacked around the same time that an intense thunderstorm left things looking like a demon ripped through. Something turned the water in my fountain freakishly red. I found a few survivors, wet as rats, babbling anxiously as they wandered the fence line. Young chickens are so bright, curious and love to explore - it’s sad to see them lose their innocence to the inevitable predatory attack.