Technical Development
3D Scanning, Sculpting and Resin Printing
for Liza Sylvestre’s asweetsea
asweetsea is a solo exhibition by artist Liza Sylvestre at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, her first solo show in the UK. Its title expands on Sweet Sea, a 1980s children’s cartoon from her childhood, which she reimagined in a new film made with her child. Through moving image, drawings, sculptures and audio works, the exhibition explores what it means to communicate and how access is created within a family.
To accompany the film, Sylvestre created a series of clear resin sculptures, Memorabilia, where memories of Sweet Sea toys merge with components of contemporary cochlear implants. With a necklace among its objects, the series moves between sculpture and jewelry.
I worked as the technical developer of the 3D pieces. I scanned objects from Liza’s collection, among them toys and hearing-impairment devices, and used those scans as raw material to create custom, monstrous 3D sculptures. The first versions were printed on a regular 3D printer; the final pieces were scaled up, divided into fragments and printed in translucent purple resin for the exhibition.
The brief grew from four to five objects: a necklace, a flower, a watering can, a sea horse and a bubble cluster. After the first desktop prints, the models were re-solidified, lightened to under 300 MB per file and cut into flat sheets with gluing bases and pins, because the large printer worked best with flat components. Pieces that were too big, like the sea horse body, were split again after test prints, which were done glossy before the final pieces were printed matt.
- Scanning: objects from the artist’s collection captured with Polycam.
- Modeling and sculpting: custom, designed 3D models built in Blender.
- Prototypes: first prints on a regular 3D printer.
- Final pieces: prepared in Z-Suite, scaled up and divided into flat gluing sheets that fit a build volume of about 34 x 34 x 20 cm, printed in clear resin at the ECS Workshop of the University of Southampton, then cleaned of support material, sanded and glued together.
Images
Presented at:
asweetsea, solo exhibition by Liza Sylvestre at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, UK. October 8, 2022 to January 14, 2023. Curated by Sarah Hayden as part of Voices in the Gallery, an AHRC funded research project, with additional support from the University of Southampton’s Higher Education Innovation Fund. Installation views by Reece Straw.
Production and support:
The production of the four pieces cost around £16,000. Setian contributed £1,000 so the final stage of development could be completed, and the John Hansard Gallery covered the rest, including the printing at the ECS Workshop, the assembly and the development of the 3D pieces. The early Zortrax test prints were covered by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. All of this was separate from the gallery’s other exhibition costs.
The team:
Liza Sylvestre: Artist, concept and design of the sculptures
Sebastian Gonzalez Dixon: Technical developer of the 3D pieces: 3D scanning, 3D modeling and sculpting, print preparation
ECS Workshop, University of Southampton: 3D printing and fabrication in Southampton, commissioned by the John Hansard Gallery
Sarah Hayden: Exhibition curator
Clients
Contemporary art gallery in Southampton, UK. Presented asweetsea and funded the production.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Liza Sylvestre’s university, where the first prototypes were printed. It covered the early Zortrax tests.
