Anna Rafalowski - “Soft Smash”

Anna Rafalowski recently received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art with a concentration in Sculpture and Ceramics from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. During her undergraduate studies she was awarded the Honors Student Excellence Award and scholarships to Penland School of Craft, Salem Art Works Student Residency, The Forge Makerspace in downtown Greensboro, and UNCG Lloyd International Honors College Artist in Residence. She has curatorial experience through the Sustainability Office at UNCG. As an undergraduate she discovered her playfulness through material learning of ceramics, wood, metal and found objects. She explores intimacy of touch that invites play and curiosity leading to a serious tinkering with a spice of humor.

Description of Work
In her work texture and form combined through stacking, packing, and mashing become building blocks in the playground of mixing and making. This unexpected piece gesturally activates joined geometric forms inspired by everyday objects. This work investigates digitally how to merge elements together by animating them through wit and humor.

April Miller - “Binky”

April Miller is an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, pursuing a BFA in Sculpture and Ceramics and a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her interdisciplinary practice is an investigation of materials and processes that is strongly influenced by sculpture, ceramics, and performance. Her work involves the queering of objects, responding to a fluid curiosity that has derived from her own experiences. April finds comfort in the ambiguity of abstraction, utilizing surreal and organic forms to express the sensual and visceral intimacy of embodiment; while speaking to issues of agency, desire, and consent.

Description of Work
Inspired by baby toys, “Binky” represents the emotional exhaustion of validation that impacts the physical queer body. Slouching in composition, the handles are considered areas of accessibility and vulnerability. With this sculpture, April wants to emphasize the importance of allowing children to have agency over their own self-discovery.

Audrey Shakespear – “Cut: Digital File To Marble Form”

Audrey Shakespear’s current research focuses on classical stone carving techniques, new digital fabrication processes, and image documentation. Her work looks at the relationship between images and objects within our ever-evolving digital infrastructure – how omnipresent exposure to images (Instagram, Google Earth, etc.) and lens narrative (You-Tube, VImeo, etc.) change how we see and interact with our physical and social environments. Known for abstract geometric designs with sharp lines and subtle plane shifts, her sculptures play with material weight, strength, and surface.

Description of Work
“Cut: Digital File to Marble Form” looks at contemporary consumption and fabrication of “information” by exploring parallels and incongruities in the digital and analogue carving processes. The composition for “Cut” is an abstract digital collage of seven different mechanical cutting heads used in the CNC stone milling process.

Caralie and Tucker Cedarleaf – “Sandstone”

Caralie Cedarleaf is a sculptor studying for her BFA at the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. She is currently in residence at ASU’s Biodesign Institute collaborating with Dr.Hao Yan and the members of his lab who research DNA origami and nanotechnology. Tucker is a visual artist and reality capture specialist working in AEC, film and television, and preservation. Caralie and Tucker utilize 3d capture technology in their work, including laser scanning, structured-light scanning, and photogrammetry. Combining digital data and with more traditional sculpture methods, they make work that investigates reality and perception.

Description of Work
Leica BLK data collected at Buckskin Gulch, UT, on marble. Marble, famously durable and strong, and sandstone, susceptible to erosion, are two stones from which the world’s most beautiful forms have been carved. From marble, Michelangelo sculpted David. From Navajo Sandstone, wind and water formed the stunning slot canyons of the American Southwest.

Diana Yan – “Lost Horse Rocking Chair”

Diana Yan is a multi-medium and multi-object designer and fabricator from California. Working in wood, steel, copper, cement, ceramics, and/or fabric, Yan crafts objects and things, that have taken the form of petri dishes, lamps, chairs, tables, a bridge, and homes. Her built articles perpetually try to choreography the connection between digital intention and physical actuality through ambiguity and dual-purpose functions. These are sometimes explicit and other times hidden.

Description of Work
Object2 is a marble rocker that brings motion to stone. As a place to take a seat, a sculpture to view or perhaps something else, this interpretation of a rocking horse allows each individual to decide and exists as an object that is defined by the viewer, rather than the creator.

Gary Kulak - “Fractal Decimation”

Gary Kulak is best known for his iconic work utilizing the chair form as gestalt and metaphor in steel and bronze. He draws from psychological content with layered meaning to provide diverse perspectives. One of the early proponents working with high and low culture, natural and cultural elements, public and private space with intimate and large-scale projects. He studied with Robert Morris, Rosalind Krauss and Alice Aycock working in her studio during the 1980’s. The exploration of physical forces in nature, material properties, global conditions and socio-political events have all served to inform his work.

Description of Work
“Fractal Decimation” demonstrates the transformational power of digital technology. Beginning with “Evolutionary Culture”, created last year during the DSP, I inflated and decimated that form to reveal asymmetrical fractal formations. The chair form as messenger continues to be the focus of my practice as a method for creating presence.

James Carl – “Pom Plume #1”

James Carl was born in Montreal in 1960. His work has been exhibited and collected in Canada, the US, China, France, Germany and Italy. Major works by Carl can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. He currently resides in Toronto and is a professor at the University of Guelph.

Description of Work
James Carl has a longstanding sculptural relationship with common forms and materials of daily life. His work at the DSP in 2018 takes product bottles and toilet plungers as starting points.

Laura Amphlett – “La Mia Stanza (My Room)”

Drawing is integral to Amphlett’s work, it serves as the basis to the majority of her pieces. She often returns to various sketchbooks to pull ideas from seemingly fleeting thoughts on the pages, and these drawings are converted to digital files that eventually translate through a machine (laser engraver, plotter, printer, etc.) to reinterpret or appropriate. Laura creates sculptural and/or dimensional pieces from these sketchbook works, playing with a connection between the 2D and 3D world, where dimensionality can be real or implied. She uses found images and materials in conjunction with personal drawings in smaller scale pieces, which translate to her larger works. The use of layering, transparency, and symbolism suggest a mysterious yet personal narrative open to the viewer to investigate. The questions her work raise relate to identity, human interaction, and existence.

Description of Work
At DSP I will be working on my piece of marble that emulates the shape of a mining quarry, and incorporates various laser-etched drawings on acrylic as well as lighting. “La Mia Stanza” relates to the female form and will evoke a sense of memory.

Mary Neubauer – “Sea Ice”

Working at the intersection of Art and Science, Mary Bates Neubauer has shown her sculpture and digital images internationally. She was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Fellow (Cambridge, UK), and a Ford Fellow. Recent projects include Garfagnana Innovazione (2014-18) and the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Residency (2016). She is an International Sculpture Center Outstanding Educator and a Presidents’ Professor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts where she serves as area coordinator in Sculpture. Her recent work in the 3D visualization of long-term data sets has focused on factors addressing global climate change and geophysical phenomena. She continues to create both large-scale and interactive public artwork expressing statistical input and human motion.

Description of Work
The sculpture Sea Ice was developed from data from a floating sensor near Point Barrow, Alaska, at the northern-most point of all U.S. Territories, and the place where the Beaufort and Chuckchi Seas meet. Normally frozen over for all but 2 or 3 months of the year, the sensors at this site have detected steadily decreasing seasonal amounts of sea ice.

Pat Wasserboehr – “Stack”

Pat Wasserboehr teaches sculpture and drawing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and served as Head of Department from 1998 to 2010. Her sculptures have been represented in art museums, centers and galleries throughout the United States and in China, Italy, Germany, and Spain. She is a participant in the Salem2Salem international exchange program in Salem, New York 2017, and Salem, Germany in 2018. This is her third summer with the Digital Stone Project in Gramolazzo, Italy. Pat is the recipient of a North Carolina Regional Artist Project Grant, several UNCG Global Undergraduate Research and Creativity awards, and Kohler International Travel Fund awards.

Description of Work
Stack is a triangular composition consisting of a dense sum of compiled angled and rounded forms. It is a visually complex and dynamic arrangement of quasi geometric clusters that reveals the artist’s interest in Cubist sculptures.

Royden Mills – “A Tenuous Fortitude”

Royden Mills is a working sculptor who has been a contract Academic at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton Canada over more than 25 years. As a younger sculptor he both accepted and turned down many great opportunities offered by Sir Anthony Caro and considers that to have been the greatest mentoring of his life. His first professional studio was in Hokkaido Japan and he now works out a rural home studio not far from Edmonton. He has won many National Awards and completed many exhibitions, large scale private and public commissions, and has work in many cities in North America. He was inducted to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2017.

Description of Work
A nature made Stone was carried from the pristine Canadian Rocky Mountain Head Waters of the North Saskatchewan River that flows past my home studio to serve the human made city of Edmonton. What material physical value is linking the natural made to the human made through Italian marble?

Sanford Mirling – “Have We Met Before?”

Blending vocabularies of modernist abstraction and contemporary popular culture, Sanford Mirling’s sculptures exploit the suggestive nature of abstracted form seemingly for its own sake. These enigmatic works, with their evocative material usage and implied corporal forms, feel manipulative -they are simultaneously familiar yet equally bizarre. The warped reality from which these sculptures seem to originate is reminiscent of a hypnagogic state, that liminal space between sleep and wake where false distinctions between memory and fantasy fade away; as past, present, and future converge for the briefest of moments. Mirling is the Co-founder of the non-profit art space in Troy, NY, Collar Works, and currently teaches in the Studio Art Program at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Description of Work
Similar to thoughts that might arise when considering an indentation left in a couch cushion, “Have We Met Before?” is a tangible representation of the way memories/fantasies are constructed in our minds.

Christopher Chenier – “Red Tumbler (24 Frames)”

Christopher Chenier is a historian and artist interested in the ways people make, share, and think about images. Using a range of digital means, Chenier works to remix distinctions between pictures and things, truth and fiction, and humans and nature. Working across disciplines and studio traditions, Chenier methodically collects, manipulates and reprocesses visual data, attempting to trace the boundaries – whether imagined or real – between the world and how we see it.

Description of Work
Echoing the 19th century time-motion studies of Edward Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, Red Tumbler (24 frames) freezes and reframes the passage of time using a range of tools developed by the artist. Capturing the rapid motion of a pigeon in flight, this sculpture materializes and extrudes time into a complex of interwoven patterns and stone vortices. Immobile in marble, the pigeon’s trail is transformed from a looping animated GIF into the more permanent, if abstracted, puzzle before you.

Claudia Dietz – “Dotty”

Claudia Dietz is an apprenticed stone carver and has studied Fine Arts with an emphasis on Sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, Germany. In her work you will find a purist and archaic influence. She occupies herself with contrasts like interior and exterior, hard and soft, fine and coarse. Her metamorphoses in stone appear lively and curious with nature always in the center. Through her precision handwork calm, sensuous and mysterious stone-sculptures emerge. Claudia‘s works often resemble organisms but yet cannot be distinctively categorized. Some even seem like composite beings of plant and animal. Sometimes the close observer feels invited to enter into a dialogue. And if one enters into that dialogue, one will discover quite quickly another aspect of her work: the ironic, humorous undertone.
Claudia lives and works in Eberdingen, Germany.

Description of Work
Unlike Claudia‘s usual practice, this sculpture originated from an ink on paper sketch – a two-dimensional starting point. The sketch was then translated into an aluminum cast, which was then again digitalized via 3D-scan. From this digital in-between 2D and 3D sphere, the sculpture will be re-materialized through a dialogue between machine and human. The outcome will be something in-between. In between artificial and natural, made and grown, really cuddly and somewhat suspicious: the idea of a creature or of a being.

Julie Romney – “Serpentina”

Julie Romney was born in Houston, Texas in 1990. Her parents loved to travel and exposed her to various forms of art throughout her childhood. She grew up admiring artwork of all kinds and begun her college career with a degree in art in mind. At first she dabbled in painting but after taking a small metals class she found her passion. Julie loves making unique jewelry, and most enjoys clean and simple details. Her work is influenced by both nature and historical decorative art styles. In addition to designing and creating jewelry she has also learned welding and foundry techniques. Julie is an Autodesk Scholarship Recipient for the 2018 Digital Stone Project/Garfagnana Innovazione Summer Workshop. She is currently getting her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Sculpture, with a focus of Small Metals at Arizona State University.

Description of Work
This work is an exploration of the fluidity of Stone. I wanted to create a form that challenges the viewers idea of marble’s solidity. The form was originally created with clay and then digitally scanned in ordered to be carved from marble.

Robert Michael Smith – “Peculiar Presidential Pawn Promenade”

Robert Michael Smith is an active pioneer of digital sculpture, 3D CG visualization/animation, virtual reality, synthetic biology, robotic CNC and 3D printed sculptures.  Smith is tenured Associate Professor at New York Institute of Technology  Department of Digital Arts and Design as well asDistinguished Professor at Tianjin Academy of Art.  Smith serves as a Founding Board Director for Digital Stone Project and a Board organizer for DSP Summer Workshops for Robotic Stone Carving at Tuscany.   Smith has exhibited globally over thirty years.  He has lectured at numerous universities, international conferences, and featured in several international articles and books.

Description of Work
“Peculiar Presidential Pawn Promenade” was developed earlier this year as a seemingly collective unconscious response to overwhelming shock and dismay due primarily to daily political news promulgated by a demented demagogue with lame pretense to be leader of the free world.  The flippant comb-over is blown to expose the back of an aged balding pate of a deviant mannequin manipulated by excessively Faustian corruption.  On the other hand it is simply a cyber abstraction free form bliss enveloping an archetypal icon.  A duality of opposites.

Sheraine Peart – “Missing Roots”

Sheraine Peart is a Jamaican born artist and amateur folklorist, which is a fancy way of saying she loves fairytales. She believes that folklore reflects the core of a culture and its values, something that is intrinsically intimate and universal, and a huge influence on her work. She is also Royal Academy of Art certified Ballerina, a cellist and unfortunately, unable to croak a note. Her current project is a virtual reality experience called Zsymel. Zsymel is based on the question: “What if magic was poisonous to humans?” and is heavily influenced by the lore of the Taino Indians. The viewer takes the place of Enya, a young girl who is casted from her home when she is poisoned by magic.

Description of Work
The question of our identity often lies in the past and the mistakes of our ancestors. “Missing Roots” depicts a canoe one of the earliest boats used by man and the Banyan tree, a symbol of protection longevity intertwined and at odds with each other.

Sumit Sarkar – “Everything Nothing”

Sumit Sarkar is a sculptor and painter working with digital and analogue techniques, taking inspiration from various sources religious iconography, science fiction and graffiti. New technology is at the forefront of Sumit’s practice and recent projects include the use of video mapping, motion capture, virtual reality and multi material 3D print.  Sumit has exhibited in various solo and group shows, with exhibitions around the UK, and international projects including a residency and exhibition at the  Colombo Art Biennale in Sri Lanka. Sumit has also directed public art projects in Shetland with UZ Arts, in Exeter with Mischief La Bas and in Finland with Spearfish.

Description of Work
Sumit’s work in Italy sees the creation of his first abstract sculpture after a lifetime of figurative work, and his first foray into working with stone. He has also explored the use of 3D scanning and print with his sculpture     in conjunction with the 7-axis robot arm marble milling processes.

Christer Aikens – “Daphne”

My practice is heavily influenced by ancient mythologies and techniques. my sculptures tend to focus on issues of personal identity and are realized as bronze castings and metal manufactured pieces. I am also influenced by the climate of neglect and disinterest in human effect on the world which is portrayed in my photographic practice. I grew up in Michigan and went to high school at Cranbrook Kingswood Schools where I was heavily inspired by the classical sculpture and architecture as well as the sciences. I got my Bachelors degree in Fine art and Art History at Hobart College in Geneva NY. I have been living and practicing in Detroit Mi. since my graduation.

Description of Work
This marble sculpture is an abstract figure called Daphne. The story of Apollo and Daphne is one of desire, hardship, and loss. The curse of Apollo’s love for Daphne drove him to pursue her across the world while she was cursed to feel aversion towards his advances and was forced to flee. Yet there was nowhere to hide from the sun god. In the end Aphrodite took pity on Daphne and transformed her into a tree to escape this suffering. The piece is about the reach for the unattainable and the cruel twists of fate our paths may take us on. It is also about our inability to escape our deeply rooted connections to the worlds forces or our continual desire for perfection and freedom.

Hongbo Gong – “Ring of Life”

Hongbo Gong was born in 1994 in Jiangxi, China. He received his degree from the College of Guangxi Arts Institute, and currently he is a postgraduate student of prof. Zhang Yangen. His specialty is the public art design.

Description of Work
This work symbolizes the cycle and zigzag of life, through the very interesting form and the ring structure to show the beauty of life and the beauty of nature. Death and new life have a circle in a circle, it seems as if a palingenesis and constitute a dance of life.

Yangen Zhang – “The Origin Of Maternal Love”

Yangen Zhang, graduated from the Arts Department of the Chinese people’s Liberation Army Institute of art, is now a member of the Guangxi Arts Institute, Professor, Master graduate student tutor, Chinese Artists Association. His sculptures are collected and permanently displayed in important places in many countries in five continents, such as France, Belgium, Holland, Australia, the United States and Mauritania, as well as many cities in China. He has held exhibitions in China, the United States, Australia, France and Belgium.

Description of Work
The curves express warmth, tenderness and plumpness in an attempt to reflect life’s exuberance. The rising of the breasts symbolizes motherly care for the whole world. The artwork itself is a tribute to maternal love.

Carolyn Frischling – “The Cloud of Unknowing – La Nube della Non-Conoscenza”

Carolyn studied at Grinnell College in Iowa, emphasizing painting, drawing and printmaking. At Washington University in St. Louis, she intensified her focus on printmaking. Over time, Carolyn expanded her art practice to include 2D digital works and videos. This ultimately led her to create 3D digital images and turning them into physical sculptures. Her prints, videos and sculpture have been shown in galleries in Pittsburgh, New York and Minneapolis, and in exhibitions at Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Butler Institute of American Art (Trumbull), and Carnegie Museum of Art.

Description of Work
Her sculpture is inspired by the anonymous medieval text on contemplation, The Cloud of Unknowing.

Jose Luis García del Castillo y López – “Untitled 50069744”

Jose Luis García del Castillo y López (1980 Linares, Spain) is an artist whose work lies at the intersection of geometry, computation, technology and data. In his work, he explores the expressive potential of classic materials under the lens of state-of-the-art digital manufacturing processes. By developing his own form generation algorithms and computer numerically controlled programs, Jose Luis pushes the boundaries of conventional craft to find novel affordances in traditional media, often pursuing the material allure through clean and elegant formal solutions. Jose Luis currently lives and works in Boston, USA.

Description of Work
Untitled 50069744 is an exploration on tangible modeling, material tectonics and robotic manufacturing. The design pushes the limits of slenderness in marble by creating a self-supporting undulating surface of 8 mm thickness, whose contours reveal the footprints of the carving process through the milky translucency of thin marble.

Jon Isherwood – “Sbocciando”

Isherwood’s work has been widely exhibited in public museums and private galleries internationally. His sculpture has recently been exhibited at Villa Strozzi, Florence, Italy, The national Museum, Beijing, China; The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum USA and in Belgrave Square, London, UK. He has had more than 20 solo exhibitions, including Reeves Contemporary in NYC, John Davis Gallery in NYC; The C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore; He has been featured in many group exhibitions, including the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy; The McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX; The Derby City Museum, Derby, UK; and Kunsthalle, Manheim, Germany. His work can be found in more than 25 public collections. Reviewed include The New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, The Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, Partisan Reviews, and in The Guardian, UK. He teaches at Bennington College, VT and is the President of the Digital Stone Project.

Description of Work
Isherwood’s most recent sculptures represent the further development of his ongoing dialogue with the associative sensations of form and surface. Forms are compressed, distorted, or squeezed, and made more intimate by subtle adjustments of scale. He does not imitate the body; however, the sensual aspect of the manipulated shape proposes physicality to the viewer even in the absence of figuration. Carved lines contour the surfaces to emphasize the form, create the illusion of expansiveness and provoke associations to patterning, layering and veiled imagery. We are invited to investigate the visual grasp of intuitive perception.

The tension between shape, pattern and skin that characterizes Isherwood’s work is further reflected in the tensions surrounding his technique and material. His sculptures are the result of a unique process in which the ancient and the modern confront one another: Stone, the oldest and most sensual sculptural material, is carved with the help of high-tech methods. This allows Isherwood to attain an uncompromised precision in his treatment of the incised surfaces, which play with and against the swelling, fleshy, soft and yet substantial character of his organic forms.