It is in our nature, as human beings, to see personality in even the most obscure items. We name our roombas, talk to our computers as if they can understand us, and apologize to tables for bumping into them; we see human elements in normal everyday objects. How many times have you looked at a wooden door and seen a face in the wood grain? Or imagined the handle of a cup as a little arm, hand on hips? We have even named parts of the vessel after parts on our own bodies- the neck of a bottle, the belly of a jar, the foot of a bowl; we seek connection in every part of our lives, we give personality and stories to every object we own. I have taken that idea and pushed in just a bit further and where I already saw bellies and hips in my previous forms I made them more obviously sculpted, taking inspiration from traditionally female curves, consciously giving my forms hips, bellies, breasts, and bums. There is something so satisfying in seeing these soft, organic forms come from such a rigid process that is 3D printing. Clay is a medium that longs to be touched, to be handled, and working in this way takes a lot of that handling out, and it is that balancing act that I find most intriguing. I did play with pinching the forms out after printing, and creating a contrast of clean printing lines with parts so obviously touched and manipulated by human hands. I think that contrast is intriguing, and deserves to be developed further.
I found a lot of success in printing these forms, and I think the forms with the patterns turned out very well, the patterns line up with the curves of the body so well, and each pattern brings out a different form to highlight on each piece. I was worried that they would come out looking too similar, but the patterns add so much variety that even though they all started with the same base, they are all different to each other.