Making for a better world
18:13 6 September 2011
Exhibitions
Tiffany O'Callaghan, CultureLab editor
(Image: 'King Silver' gorilla sculpture/David Mach RA/2011/Private Collection/Richard Riddick/thedpc.com)
As I swung my gaze down from the blue-green glass swirls of the Dale Chihuly sculpture dangling in the atrium at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, it landed on a blurry silver gorilla. Blinking, I walked over, and found that what appeared to be an aura around the three metre-tall primate sculpture was actually the curling tops of the hundreds of coat hangers from which it was made. As I considered King Silver Gorilla, captured mid chest thump, I wondered what inspired sculptor David Mach to create it - how he'd stared at a heap of hangers and dreamed up this shiny, imposing piece.
And that, I soon learn, is precisely the point. Opening today, the exhibition Power of Making is meant to inspire people to consider craft and production differently - and to close the gap between the stuff we use, or find beautiful, and the way it is created. "This exhibition is to update perceptions," says curator Daniel Charny. "It's not just about working with your hands, it's about the skill and the care and the imagination that goes into making."
The hall is filled with exquisite objects: a flawless dressage saddle, a gleaming six-necked guitar, an intricately hand-carved wooden table, and a pair of the torturous-looking crab-claw Alexander McQueen armadillo shoes.
But the items on display aren't solely examples of traditional craftsmanship. Modern technology is dotted throughout the gallery - from the space suit designed by MIT aeronautical engineer Dava Newman to a pair of hexapod robots. On a table sit a collection of 3D printers - among them Dr. Adrian Bowyer's RepRap open-source 3D printer and the MakerBot Thing-o-Matic. Charny says they represent the possibility that in the future, printing things at home won't only be routine, it will also allow us to make more personal tweaks to designs.
The silicone-based material sugru is designed to let people tweak everyday objects exactly this way. Created by Jane ni Dhulchaointigh, the bright orange material is displayed tacked onto a small coffee carafe, to make the base more stable, and dotting a saxophone, to add extra grip and tailor its fit to the individual musician. "It's not just a glue or a putty, it's a whole way of thinking about mending," Charny says.
Many of the items in the exhibition incorporate a mixture of careful craft and whimsical ingenuity. A dress woven from polyester threads and audio cassette tape hangs beside a patchwork quilt made by MIT researchers. In performances, the artist Alyce Santoro (who designed the dress, which her mother wove on an old-fashioned loom) runs the magnetic head from a tape player along the fabric, producing an eerie, warbling collection of sounds. The MIT quilt can be draped over an object, and the sewn-in Bluetooth and tilt-sensing technologies generate a digital map of the object's contours.
The more than 100 pieces in the exhibit are meant to fascinate and surprise, Charny says. As I lean in to admire what appears to be a blue and white bit of crochet work, I learn that it's actually a machine-embroidered implant surgeons have used as a scaffolding for nerve tissues in surgery to reconstruct the shoulder of a cancer patient. "It looks like a snowflake doily, but when you know what it does..." Charny trails off, meaningfully.
(Image: Face Saving' nose cartilage moulding/Matt Durran/2010/Crafts Council)
The glass nose moulds by artist Matt Durran are another inspiring example of medical "making". He began working on them when a surgical researcher from the Royal Free Hospital visited his studio. The research team had been struggling to create a non-reactive, but detailed, mould for tissue-engineered cartilage for patients who had lost their noses to disease. Beginning with a computer-generated 3D representation and then a plaster cast of his own nose, Durran used a technique called slumping - laying warm glass over a mould with painstaking care - to make several glass moulds of his own nose. He gave them to the research team as a proof of concept.
"Then about a month later I went into the hospital and saw about 20 of my noses growing in a tank!" he says. The mould, it was clear, had worked. Now Durran says a glass-moulded, tissue engineered nose will be implanted into the arm of a patient in just a couple of weeks. It will be vascularised and incorporated into the skin, so that it can be transplanted later onto the patient's face.
Durran, who made the glass mould used to grow a synthetic windpipe transplanted into a patient earlier this summer, says the use of glass moulds for growing tissue-engineered noses, throats and even voice boxes represents a niche role for the local glass artist. If this becomes a standard procedure, he says, medical teams may increasingly look to local craftsmen to play a vital part in the process - endorsement indeed for the power of making.
Power of Making can be found at London's Victoria & Albert Museum until 2 January 2012.