Commonwealth, Joshua Davis: Tropism

 
  • ©,

Artist(s):


Title:


    Tropism

Exhibition:


Creation Year:


    2008

Medium:


    Archival giclée prints on watercolor paper.

Category:


Artist Statement:


    Tropism is a biological phenomenon that descibes the movement of a plant or flower in response to a stimulus. Here, Tropism is a collaborative project that bridges the techniques and visions of two digitally oriented art and design studios: Commonwealth and Joshua Davis. Commonwealth’s language of form, generated within animation software, became the genesis of the Tropism porcelain vases. Output as SLA rapid-prototyped models,

    Commonwealth’s design was directly translated from digital idea to material object. These rapid-prototyped prints were taken to Boehm Porcelain, a traditional fine-bone porcelain maker, and cast into a series of digitally driven porcelain vases.

    Graphic compositions, created by freezing rule-based, animated programs written by Joshua Davis, were digitally output as sheets of ceramic paint and fired into the porcelain surface of the vase. Davis’ graphics, inspired by Arthur Harry Church’s “Types of Floral Mechanics,” are algorithmic compositions of colors and forms produced by rule-driven systems. The printed sheets of graphic paint were fused into the figurative surfaces of Commonwealth’s porcelain. The kiln-fired result is a series of unique objects demonstrating a kind of creative exchange facilitated by digital-design techniques and tools.

    Joshua Davis’ giclée watercolor prints were produced using the same generative techniques as those used to produce the graphic paint sets that were fired into the porcelain vases. This created a fluid relationship between print and object, and between planar graphic and porcelain form.

    In all senses of the term, tropism describes an exposure to stimulus. Commonwealth, known for their experimental products and form, and Joshua Davis, known for his generative graphics, collaborated to create a work that expresses multiple tendencies within art and computational design.

Other Information:


    Painted and Glazed Slipcast Porcelain vases translated from rapid-prototype SLA prints