It began with an idea for a centre piece sculpture to be created for the gardens at the Holy Cross Abbey in Wales. I was working there for Sue Diamond, a landscape gardener and fellow graduate of fine art sculpture at Carmarthen School of Art. Sue thought my style of work, which combined digital technology with traditional materials and processes, would generate a good enough sculpture for the nuns at the abbey. The material that caught our eye for the project was two pallets of Welsh slate taken from the roof when it was replaced many years ago. We met with the nuns to discuss what shape this sculpture would take. The woman of the abbey had very traditional tastes in art, and to demonstrate this they brought out a couple of their favourite statuettes. The photo above is of the Madonna and Child statuette that caught my eye and would be the catalyst for this project.

So right there and then I could see this as the perfect reference for a layered slate sculpture. The Madonna was sitting on a chair which could provide a strong foundation the sculpture, and the piece did not have too many overhangs. I had recently been experimenting with some basic photogrammetry and thought this would be a great way to start the design of the sculpture. We took the statue to the workshop for some better lighting and I went about taking a series of photos of the piece. Later I used a program called 3DF Zephyr to generate a 3D model from the photos taken. The photo to left is a screenshot of the finished scan. Spurred on by the success of this scan I worked on creating a proposal for the nuns which included the finished design and a completed section of the sculpture.

So the next stage of this design was in Zbrush. I needed to isolate the Madonna and Child from all the surrounding area, leaving the model and closing off the bottom so it was a solid object. I then sculpted some of the lost detail and sent one stl. off to be 3D printed (this model included the chair), and then prepared another 3D model by cutting out the chair as this would be replaced with breeze blocks at the site of installation.

Next stage was take this model into Slicerforfusion360 to generate templates for all the layers. I printed them at home on a £20 printer. They were A4 so I had to stick four together to make up the whole template then cut them up. Over 500 pages!

In order to get the go ahead for the project I needed to make a presentation to the nuns of the Holy Cross Abbey. They needed to put the project to a vote amongst all their members. I had talked to some of their members about what I planned to do, and there were some reservations. The methods I was using were unfamiliar to them, and idea of layers of slate making up the two figures was difficult for them to visualise. The presentation sought to address these points and went great. I had screenshots of the processes and talked to them about Zbrush and photogrammetry. They were fascinated by it and it was great to expose them to something they had never seen before. And to clinch the proposal I had made the child section of the sculpture so they could see how the layered slate would work. They unanimously voted for the go ahead and a couple months later I arrived at the site ready to get to work.

From laptop to hammer, there's nothing like working between digital and physical methods of making. We chipped our way through hundreds of slate rooftiles. The picture to the left shows the setup me and Sue had to shape each layer of the sculpture. There was a mixture of grey and purple slate to work with. I started with the grey and then gradually introduced the purple until it was all purple toward the top part of the sculpture.