Preliminary artist statement - needs to be refined and cleaned up a lot

 

My work explores the transformation of light into tangible form, merging computational processes with material experimentation. Through algorithmic drawing, computational sculpture, and generative fabrication, I develop methods that reinterpret photography as a spatial, sculptural medium. By translating images into 3D-printed topographies, I investigate the ways digital and physical mark-making converge, bridging traditional printmaking with emerging technologies, exploring how the ephemeral qualities of light and shadow can become tangible, spatial compositions and physical objects. This process allows me to engage with the expressive potential of digital fabrication - not as mere reproduction, but as a medium of abstraction, intervention, and discovery.

I develop custom algorithms that analyze the tonal structure of photographs, converting them into three-dimensional reliefs. These forms are then refined, manipulated, and fabricated using 3D printing, where layers of filament act as brushstrokes, accumulating into physical textures. The resulting works exist at the intersection of photography, painting, and sculpture, challenging distinctions between image and object, surface and depth. Through this method, I treat the 3D printer as both an extension of the artist’s hand and a generative tool capable of materializing unseen dimensions within an image.

By treating the 3D printer as both a sculptor’s chisel and a printmaker’s press, I combine practices of digital and physical mark-making. My work draws from traditions of photography and printmaking while engaging with contemporary questions of machine agency and generative authorship. As I refine my process, I explore new ways of integrating color, texture, and material variation - imagining the 3D printer as a painter’s brush, capable of rendering layered, sculptural images.

As I refine my process, I aim to expand the possibilities of computational fabrication - investigating multi-color printing, adaptive resolution strategies, and hybrid approaches that incorporate hand intervention. Through these explorations, I seek to create works that challenge conventional distinctions between image and object, mark-making and materiality, human intention and algorithmic emergence, challenging the threshold between control and emergence, code and gesture, image and form.

Ultimately, my work is an inquiry into transformation - how digital and material realities inform one another, and how the interplay of light, structure, and process can yield new ways of experiencing our visual and tactile world.