Vessel.
Vessel is a sculptural artwork, initially produced for the exhibition Journey’s, Pathways and Track Plans (2014), contributed by invitation to the international exhibitions 3D Glitch (2015-17). It comprises a 3D-printed colour model of the artist holding a ceramic artefact. The actual ceramic artefact is purposefully excluded from the exhibition.
The artwork contributed to 3D Glitch’s curatorial imperative to explore anti-perfection in an age of digital perfectibility. The work interrogates the presumptions involved in equating the idea of ‘perfection’ with the ideas of ‘original’ and ‘authentic’.
- Submitting institution
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Staffordshire University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 5058
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Spode Works, Stoke-on-Trent; Priestman Gallery, Sunderland University; Ny Space, Manchester; Washington Art Centre, Tyne and Wear; Drugo More, Rijeka, Croatia.
- Open access status
- -
- Month of production
- -
- Year of production
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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A - The C3 Centre: Creative Industries and Creative Communities
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- To explore the possibility of a new age of digital anti-perfection, Branthwaite created a clay artefact in order to produce a sculptural artwork as a 3D-printed colour model, of himself as the artist holding the artefact.
The material production methodology focused on consumer access to digital replication technology. It explored how this mass-market access can be used to create digital surrogates for material cultures. Branthwaite used the 3DMe mass-market software, made available in Britain through the ASDA supermarket, to create a 3D-printed reproduction of himself holding the original artefact. By holding the artefact, the artist was a ‘vessel’ to carry its physical shape and motivating concepts, and he merged with the object into a newly printed work that complicated the initial artefact’s primacy.
The artefact and the model draw scrutiny to the potential for a reproduction to have more importance than an original item. By merging the artist’s presence with the reproduction, Vessel examines how material cultures can ‘infect’ the artist with the potential to be an inauthentic version of their own person. Focusing these questions onto the 3D model, Vessel shows how digital modelling technology offers new avenues for material cultures to critique the idea that a reproduction is in a hierarchical relationship to an initial object, while equally showing how this critique can be focused on the possibility of another hierarchical relationship, one existing between the ‘original’ object and the artist themselves.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
