Made@EU Exhibition

This multicomponent research proposes a digital drawing modelling technique as a form-finding and form-generation model in craft practice by way of expanding the praxis of ceramics. It introduces both mimetics/metonymy as a concept in digital making (digital metonymy); and a contemporary lexicon in digital drawing, aiming to extend the semantics of form-making. The research looks at the slippage, gaps and interstices between analogue and digital craftsmanship by interrogating the performativity of digital making and the morphology of contemporary digital drawing. It aims to broaden the relationship between analogue and digital tools, techniques and methodologies of practice.
Bringing into play a distinctive model of digital making by using Motion Capture Technology, 3D scanning and ‘Sense’ software to convert the process of image-making to a motion-led protocol to visualise form, this multicomponent research generated a series of prototypes (artefacts). It proposes a relational, responsive, adaptable method of digital-forming, a blend between physical-making and digital fabrication, interrogating the relationships between digital and analogue models of practice in ceramics in terms of:
(1) Making-performance - how software (digital crafting) mediates a haptic, embodied, corporeal type of making in the process of fabrication of form; an intuitive way of working with software for designer-makers. In this view it suggests the concept of mimetics (digital metonymy) as an approach to form-making in ceramics - by which digital forming assimilates into the physicality of hand-making through an imitative, simulated, derivative process. (2) Digital language – addressing the significance of digital drawing as a form-making modelling technique in ceramic craft; proposing a word-led digital vocabulary in contemporary craft and drawing practice. In this view it investigates the sensorial nature of a written, embodied language by expanding the possibility of forming clay through a method of form-writing (a crafting with words).