On making, failure and the 3D clay printer - Si Sapsford

I’d been working with clay for some time, gradually moving away from recognisable forms towards more abstract sculptures, exploring slippage and collapse, and the susceptibility of materials to gravity. I was interested in the instability of things, in landslides and the effects of climate change.

When I was given the opportunity to work with a 3D clay printer, I was curious about what it might offer, but also what it might take away. Clay is such a tactile material, and the thought of handing over some of the making to a machine seemed to risk losing something. I decided to see what I might gain in return.

I began with the familiar shape of a cup or vase. It’s one of our oldest made forms, and I was interested in bringing together this ancient material with contemporary technology. But I wasn’t looking for a perfect vessel. I wanted to disrupt the printer’s precision, to introduce the possibility of failure.

I designed forms with impossible undercuts, knowing that gravity would eventually have its way, and my vases would fail. The printer would follow its programmed route regardless of what happened. It couldn’t recognise a mistake, or make a judgement about whether something ought to be changed. My task was to intervene, to see how far I could push the design before it collapsed.

As the coils of clay began to rise, I found myself responding almost instinctively. I pushed the walls inwards, distorted them and added lumps of clay, encouraging the extruded coils to slip and loop. The printer continued, serenely unaware of my activities. If I stopped interfering, its original pattern gradually re-emerged, the programmed shape returning, triumphant but precarious.

With one particularly ambitious form, the clay began to collapse almost immediately. I grabbed chunks of dried clay and worked as quickly as I could, trying to keep ahead of the nozzle. Eventually I managed to save it. The neat coils began to emerge again, and when the programme finished I was left with a strange, rather ugly shape that I quite liked.

I felt that we had triumphed over adversity. The machine had done its part; I had done mine. It seemed, for a moment, like teamwork.

There was something strangely companionable about the experience. I began to think of the printer as an assistant, an oblivious companion. Of course, it wasn’t responding to me at all. It was simply following instructions. Yet I found myself attributing a kind of partnership to what was happening.

On another occasion, I became so absorbed in the process that I forgot the very quality I had set out to explore. The clay, the undercut and the accumulating weight became too much, and the whole thing collapsed. I put it aside, thinking I might find another use for it once it had dried.

I was reminded that the machine’s precision could never remove the uncertainty inherent in the material. Nor could my interventions entirely control what happened.

I’m still interested in this uneasy relationship between making and programming, between intention and accident, control and resistance. Perhaps what intrigued me most was not whether the machine could make a vase, but how much I wanted to believe we were making it together.

A longer version of this appears in https://www.masseducation.co.uk/mass-issue-1