Conceptual artist Anya Gallaccio’s Beautiful Minds installation 3D prints wet clay hexagonal forms over a period of weeks to create a scaled model of Devil’s Tower. 

Anya Gallaccio is a British conceptual artist known for her work with organic matter and natural forms. Perhaps her most famous installation is: preserve ‘beauty’. The work features red flowers arranged in four rectangles underneath large panes of glass. The flowers wither and die during the installation. Viewers experience the artwork through their sense of smell as well as visually.

However, for her latest installation, she is using a 3D printer. The huge machine is suspended from a gantry which spans the ceiling. The printer pumps out wet clay in hexagonal forms. Over a few weeks, this print will build up to form clay hexagons which make up a scaled model of the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.

Devil’s Tower is a sacred Native American site. However, you’re more likely to recognize it from when Spielberg used it as the location of an alien landing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Gallaccio is focusing on the contradictions of ancient landscapes being the backdrop for futuristic technologies. However, most interestingly is the fact that Beautiful Minds will collapse in on itself as it is being printed. As with Gallaccio’s previous work, the process is the point, rather than the outcome.

“I like the absurdity, that we build this mountain and then it has to be destroyed,” Gallaccio explains while asking: “What is the object and what is the artwork?”

The Inspiration Behind Beautiful Minds

The USA hugely influences Gallaccio’s piece. She works as a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. To create this installation, she worked in collaboration with her students.

She claims to be ‘obsessed with the desert, the sand, the landscape’ around San Diego. However, she has also contrasted this landscape with the technical reputation of California and built a 3D printer.

The Beautiful Minds piece in on display at Thomas Dane Gallery in London. Gallery assistants feed wet clay into a pumping vat and visitors can watch as the printer creates a series of hexagonal grids. Considering the noise and mess of the piece, so far, Gallaccio has received a lot of praise and interest. Once the print is complete, it will be disposed of.

Compared to the fact that so many 3D prints are extremely controlled, it’s refreshing to see a piece of art which makes the most of the technology while still embracing imperfections.

If you are in London, you can visit Beautiful Minds at the Thomas Dane Gallery until March 25th, 2017.

Source: Apollo Magazine