Heather Gorham is a well-known painter and sculptor from Dallas who has garnered considerable attention for her Animal Tower work of art. The piece was digitally generated in sections by the artist — each animal was digitally sculpted on a computer using free form software, and then combined to form the complete piece of art.
It is no coincidence that the sculpture is reminiscent of the Bremen Town Musician (Bremer Stadtmusikanten), as Heather Gorham is quite open about how this influenced her: “I loved the story of the Bremen Town Musician as a child, and it inspired me to undertake this work.”
Transferring the sculpture for the digital to the physical world was made possible by voxeljet’s 3D printing technology. The large three-dimensional structure was produced in sand on one of the company’s industrial grade 3D printers at the Augsburg service centre. The major challenge for this project was the scale — the sculpture is 1.20 metres high, weighs 66 kg and features very sophisticated details, particularly in the upper segment. The part was built in layers of 0.3 mm over 22 hours using voxeljet’s GS14 sand material.
The sculpture was printed — in one piece — on the voxeljet VX4000 large-format printer, which can generate moulds with volumes of up to eight cubic metres. Voxeljet offers the only 3D printing technology platform that can print at this scale.
The artist herself was very impressed with the result of the 3D printing process: “3D printing technology offers a totally new dimension of freedom for artists and designers. The level of precision and detail achieved by the voxeljet printers is really surprising.”
