What you’re looking at above is two versions of the "long legged Maskitt", a creation of the Canadian metaverse-based artist known as Bryn Oh -- the left, standing 30 feet high, from one of her 3D installations in Second Life; the right, standing six inches tall, a bronze sculpture made from her actual hands. The latter is going to be featured at the Santorini Biennial in Greece, in November this year.
“I was approached by an organizer of the virtual portion [of the art festival] who has an avatar named Art Blue,” Bryn tells me. “The curator follows my work and collects both paintings and sculpture. He actually visited me here in Canada from Germany a few years ago to purchase some oil paintings. Due to this connection they approached me to have the bronze sculptures created as awards.”
Here’s how she converted the sculpture from digital 3D to actual 3D, through a rather clever process using clay and a 3D modeling program:
‘The clay is the base from where you make a mould. The mould has a hard outer shell and a polyurethane rubber or silicone center. Once the mould is finished, you pour wax into the mould creating a replica. This is called the lost wax process. Rather than build with clay, I now will build in Zbrush -- a 3D program which, when used with a pressure sensitive pen tablet, is a bit like working with clay.... After building the model in Zbrush I can then have a 3D print created, and that print now becomes the original from which the lost wax process is taken.”
The Maskitt is part of Bryn’s interlocking narrative, which she’s been telling for over 10 years through her virtual world installations, a story of nature and technology wildly out of sync:
