Two artists stood out at yesterday's Maker Faire in San Mateo: Nemo Gould, who uses recycled materials to make kinetic sculptures of dreamy, Art Deco cyborgs; and Bathsheba Grossman, who turns algorithms and scientific diagrams into gorgeous, abstract sculptures made with 3D printers. Both spent the day at booths mobbed by adults and children who wanted to touch the art and learn more about these geeky sculptors' methods.
Gould, who is about to begin an artist residency program at the San Francisco Dump, showed me one of his most recent sculptures, called John Deer (pictured above; go here for a side view) Made of brushed aluminum and brass, it looks vaguely like a deer-human riding a tractor-bicycle – if you push a large black button on its base, the deer-human starts pedaling and turning the wheels. "There's a blurred line between the machine and the operator in this piece," explained Gould. He added that one of his big inspirations as a kid was watching the scene in Star Wars where the sand people are scrapping robots in a huge robot chop shop. "I've spent my whole life trying to claim that moment, and now my shop looks just like the one the sand people had."
In another area of the Faire, next to an enormous display of 3D printers, Bathsheba Grossman was explaining her sculptures to a crowd of admirers. Some of the intricately-interlocked cubes are representations of algorithms and fractals; the laser-etched glass pieces represent stellar coordinates and protein structures. Earlier that morning, she'd had the chance to run off one of her designs, Soliton, on a 3D printer called Candyfab using rock sugar (in the image below, you can see the brown-white rock sugar Soliton).
Grossman makes her designs in a CAD system, and feeds the files to an Ex One 3D printer that can handle metals. Once her design has been printed, Grossman uses what she calls old-fashioned techniques to finish it off and give it a distinctive texture. She oxidizes bronze pieces to give them color, and uses power tools to burnish them. Some of Grossman's sculptures have been used on television and film sets. These pieces delight the eye, but they also light your brain on fire. One sculpture "demonstrates the principles of self-intersection and tetrahedral symmetry;" another shows how "the point at zero becomes equal to the point at infinity."
