Inkjet & Digital Printing

Reinterpreting the Bremen Town Musicians (Bremer Stadtmusikanten)

Wednesday 12. February 2014 - Heather Gorham, well-known painter and sculptor from Dallas, has garnered considerable attention for her Animal Tower work of art. It special feature: The artist created each animal on the computer using a free form software, and then digitally combined the figures into a complete piece of art.

It is no concidence that the sculpture is reminiscent of the Bremen Town Musician, as confirmed by Heather Gorham: “I loved the story of the Bremen Town Musician as a child, and it inspired me to undertake this work.”
Thanks to voxeljet, it was only a small step from the finished computer model to a physical three-dimensional structure. The piece of art was built in sand on a 3D high-performance printer at the Augsburg service centre. The real challenge for this project became obvious once the CAD data for the work was made available: The sculpture is 1.20 metres high and features very sophisticated details in the upper segment.
An object of this size can only be built in one piece on a voxeljet VX4000 large-format printer, which can generate moulds with volumes of up to eight cubic metres.
Printing and unpacking were also made easy notwithstanding the demanding nature of this particular task. The piece was first shown at the RAPID trade fair in Pittsburgh (USA), where trade visitors could admire not just the appearance and vibrancy of the piece of art, but also the excellent quality of the sand mould and its impressive details.
Even the artist herself was very impressed with the result of the 3D printing process: “3D printing technology offers a totally new dimension of freedom for artists and designers. The level of precision and detail achieved by the voxeljet printers is really surprising”, says Heather Gorham.