Sven Christian [SC]: Let’s chat about your 3D prints?

Marco Cianfanelli [MC]: The 3D prints focus on the notion of found implements, like flintstones and weapons, a lot of which have been found in the region, whereas the large Cerebral Aspect looks more at the humanoid form, exploring the shape of the brain.

SC: Through the course of these conversations, I was interested to learn that some of the works on show were not created as maquettes, but as sculptures in-and-of themselves that were later recreated large, for exhibition. Your cardboard maquette of Reconstruction – cradle to grave (2005–9) makes me think you did began with the maquette, with a view towards a larger work. Is that accurate?

MC: I think it highlights the progress, or process, over a long period. Reconstruction was first exhibited at Gallery MOMO in 2005. Coming from a background in painting, that was really my first exhibition with three-dimensional works. The cardboard maquette points to the very early days, from 2002 to 2005, when I was using laser-cut processes, trying to construct three-dimensional forms on two-dimensional platforms. Even though I’d been working with computers for a while, I initially only used two-dimensional graphic platforms.

Reconstruction was a very clumsy installation at MOMO. It was suspended from the ceiling but it also utilised the benefits of the gallery space, where things don’t have to be permanent, stand upright, etcetera. At MOMO it was a much more linear evocation. The cardboard maquette, which is almost a generic form, began by taking tools, like sections, through a three-dimensional form in Photoshop, which were then reconstructed as contours in two-dimensional software and cut out to “reconstruct” the figure. It was a very arduous way of doing things. I then looked at the sections and used them as the basis — a partial construction.

In 2009, I was invited to exhibit Reconstruction for the Sources exhibition at NIROX, for which I rebuilt the sculpture and augmented it. I made changes and added to it, to make it a self-supporting thing. If I remember correctly, the cardboard maquette played no more role in that work, but it did inform others, all much smaller.
So the maquette shows a certain progress of form-making, for someone who didn’t think of themselves as a sculptor and was slowly working with sculptural form.

SC: We often focus on the conceptual to the detriment of process, material, and how those expand the horizons of a particular work’s resonance. For me the cardboard maquette of Reconstruction reads a bit like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), and you mentioned the digital process but also how it was more linear
at MOMO, compared to its installation here, and that it led to other works?

MC: You may not see it in the photographs, but the cardboard maquette doesn’t have a permanent state of being; it’s a whole lot of sections that slide onto rods, so you can treat it like a book, I suppose, and leaf through it. It’s like a work-in-progress. At the time I was really interested in using laser technology, not to exploit its ease of making or its ability to make coherent three-dimensional forms, but the relationship between some kind of visual recognisability and some kind of abstraction, which involves the viewer moving around. It’s one reason I haven’t made any kinetic works, because I like that the viewer must move to transform the work. It speaks about a time- based experience, like reading.

That led to an interest in using lots of data in sculptural form, to further emphasise the notion of reading — a layered result — but still looking at this idea that something looks quite abstract, minimal, or even incomplete from certain views, and maybe even a bit crude. From other angles, it might evoke something visually recognisable. For example, The Mind’s Vine at Tokara [Wine Estate] evokes these vines, suggesting the surrounding vineyards, but it’s layered with texts that you can read and which contextualise the work, taking a very broad view of wine (scientifically, historically, mythologically). On top of it being a self-supporting structure in the environment, like Cradle to Grave, it’s got support underground, but it rests on and can exist in, the landscape.

SC: At Gallery MOMO it was suspended.

MC: I’ll admit it was it was a very ambitious exhibition. It was quite a monumental time for me, because I was trying a lot of stuff, in the eleventh hour. I came to realise my complete naivety and lack of experience with built things. Ironically I’ve gone on to be very good at making things that are reliably stable in the environment.

SC: I guess the modular nature of a work like Reconstruction also lends it a certain dynamism, beyond the various ways in which you can install it or shift things around. It’s interesting to hear you talk about the maquette in those terms, too, like some kind of puzzle. I almost picture being able to hold and twist it so that the legs start to look like someone walking. You could play with it.

MC: I made work for the 2004 Kebble Award which had to be modular, so it could be shipped to Cape Town. Further to your point, though, when we brought the pieces of Reconstruction to NIROX to install, I remember looking at them lying on the ground and wondering if it was more interesting unassembled; more than the cohesive form, which wasn’t trying to be cohesive at all. Because of the nature of the profile, it’s always going to be abstract from certain angles. I suppose that breaking the components down allows a break in the profile’s rigour. Being parallel in space, the parts adhere to a planar relationship.

SC: I remember being surprised by how light the work looked. It felt airy. That, coupled with the ambiguity of the figure’s pose — either rising or falling — lends it a sense of movement. Of course, I know it’s incredibly heavy, even when it’s taken apart. Still, there’s a lightness to it in the landscape.

MC: Whenever I work at NIROX, or in the region, I’m mindful of the origins thing, so the body emerging or receding is just a nice way of thinking about that.

SC: Looking at the cardboard maquette, there are a number of compressed, flat cutouts. At some point, when transitioning from the maquette to the large work, you decided to cut the centre out, keeping just the contours so that people can see through the work. I’m wondering why you decided to do that, because you could have easily cut multiple, whole sheets of steel and arranged them in the same way as the maquette, but you chose not to?

MC: Yes, that is very interesting. There were a number of reasons. Some are pragmatic, others less so. I remember, for example, the line-drawing lessons at school. If you think of pen and ink drawings, the spaces between the marks are as important. By opening the sculptural form up and thinking very carefully about the thickness of that line, its depth, and how the different lines interact, how they let light through, how they imply form... All these things have a significant bearing on our perception. Whereas the silhouettes are much more assertive. They’re not nearly as compelling as the expansion of the line.

After NIROX, when I started making a lot of public art, I was working on two-dimensional software. I like it because you can draw and you have to try imagine the thing. Then, when you feel that you have got to a certain point, you get components cut from cardboard and you sit and assemble them. Then you make changes on the computer. Then you remake another model. I had employed people or collaborated with 3D designers, but I also started to learn the software. Broadly speaking, I don’t know what my position is, but the need to build analogue models has somehow fallen away. Now I have a lot of digital models and iterations of works I’ve made.

SC: Another artist on show, Dean Hutton, began with a digital rendering. They made a mock-up on Photoshop of how they imagined the work, Floating Bodies, to look in one of the dams. That model is also a prototype, blueprint or projection that one works towards. For me, it’s not that disimilar from a maquette, in that it helps visualise the work, but it’s not sufficient in-and-of itself. They’ve had to get involved, physically, to figure out the next steps.

To go back to what you were saying, though, about how the digital has overtaken the analogue, there are obviously cost implications. When people submit proposals for work in the Park, it’s often a
3D rendering or some digital animation. I’m curious about your thoughts on the digital, because it’s clear it also has some kind of conceptual underpinning in your work.

MC: It’s difficult to distill one’s interests. There are a handful of things that are central to what I try and do. One is to try make work that evokes a sense of the complexity of our experience, in the broadest sense. The other is this push-pull between the handmade and the technologically reliant. For me, it’s a bit of the left brain / right brain dynamic, which seems to represent us in our entirety, in terms of our emotive desires, our intellectual curiosity...

When I started doing laser-cut stuff a lot of people felt it was to make things easier, and my position was completely different. You should have conceptual grounds to use something — a technology — but it would be a mistake to burden yourself with reason from the beginning. Of course, you do need a conceptually compelling motivation to use 3D printing or laser cutting; if it’s to make it easier, then maybe there needs to be something about productivity and efficiency that interests you. Otherwise it’s just a tool. That’s why I haven’t made many 3D-printed artworks, because I haven’t found

a reason to, yet. But then I also do, you know? It’s amazing how technology seems to be ramping at an exponential rate. If I look back twenty years, it feels like a completely different world. I suppose, for me, there’s a desire to go back to the unconceptualised gesture or to unprompted hand-making. I don’t sketch as much as I’d like, but most ideas start on paper. The digital world is a labyrinth. I have experimented with stuff digitally and found an outcome, and it’s important to wander and get lost, but it can also consume you. Automation tools are more and more accessible and they ask big questions of the individual.

SC: To go back to Cerebral Aspect and the 3D printed versions, the one thing I could say is that the 3D print does lend or contribute a sense of almost complete uniformity to the work; the two halves of the brain look identical. I don’t think you could get that quite the same with analogue processes. Maybe it’s the coding that makes it visually apparent.

MC: I can’t remember the coding exactly, but we found a 3D model of a brain, perhaps online. In 2016 there were quite a few people working with me, and the software we were working with, called Rhino (which I use a lot now), allows you to input the resolution when you have a faceted form made out of triangles, so we fiddled with various resolutions of reduction. Basically, you could say, ‘Ok, take this brain and make it out of a thousand forms’, or ‘make it out of ten.’ Looking at the brain versus the paleolithic implement, the flint, it was sort of moved between the one and the other. That was really interesting — the idea of simplification or reductiveness, especially with the brain as a subject. We had this real-time reshaping of the brain, this simplification and form-finding, which was playful. In that sense, it would have been really difficult to do by hand.

The other cardboard brain, which is one lobe closed, was laser cut and laser perforated so that you could theoretically fold it like origami to get the form that exists on the computer, but it’s actually really hard to do, because you might have the shapes but you don’t know the exact angles and so it can easily become another shape when you’re trying to reconstruct it.

The 3D printer prints exactly to the limitations of the filaments of the printer. You don’t have to worry about defining angles. So to cut a long story short, yes, there can be a benefit to 3D printing.

SC: When you talk about the reduction or softening of the 3D prints, of the brain, the way I relate to that is like, if I’m on Photoshop and there are X amount of pixels in an image and I reduce that amount to reproduce the same image, it’s going to pixelate or give you less definition. It’ll make it more abstract, but

MC: Yeah, and that becomes a matter of orientation. I did a series of four prints for my exhibition at Goodman Gallery of a skull. But I had a colleague and friend who was a radiographer. He gave me CT scans right through a head, and I layered them in Photoshop, so they had a translucency. You could slightly see all the layers and then turn that into a woodblock for traditional printing. But I did it at four very different resolutions. So as you say, we pixelated it; the first being very fine, to the fourth, which was much cruder.

What’s interesting is that the further you stand from them, the more the cruder ones start making sense. I’ve always wanted to make one or two that were even more simplified, less pixels, to see how far away you can stand for it to still be compelling.

SC: I mean, you’re essentially asking your audience to do what you do when in the maquette making process, right? There’s this leap of faith required, when it comes to orientating your imagination to project something.

MC: And also how incredible our brains are taking visual stimulus and filling in the gaps. It’s incredible how much we take for granted, in terms of what we’re seeing and how much we’re actually improvising, mentally. It’s that whole thing of seeing shapes in the clouds, or on a stained floor — faces and whatever... It’s like our brain wants to find these things.