Intentional / Accidental

Clay goes onto the wheel, gets thrown, turned and bisque fired. Then it gets 3D scanned. The scans get repaired in Fusion 360, their meshes edited down, deliberately broken into interesting shapes, and rearranged into new forms. Those forms get rendered, 3D printed, and used to cast plaster moulds — and then clay goes back in, pressed as slices into the moulds, or slip cast using homemade slip.

Ceramic to digital to ceramic. Each pass through a medium introduces its own accidents: the scanner misreads a shadow, the mesh smooths a thumbprint, the print needs scaffolding that leaves its own marks, the second firing warps something that was square.

The question the project is actually asking is which of those accidents are noise, and which are the work.

What runs in parallel

Running in parallel across the project:

• Wheel throwing — practice pots, large pots, turning, and recycling the unfired scraps back into usable clay.
• Marbled clay — colouring clay with oxides, wedging the coloured clays together, then moulding and cutting it into slices. Nerikomi.
• 3D scanning — pots individually, pots stacked, and found objects, then arranging them in Fusion 360.
• Moulding and casting — plaster casting from the 3D prints, pressing clay slices into the plaster moulds, slip casting.
• Firing and finishing — bisque firing at each stage, then glazing.

What didn’t work out

Kept in, because it’s the useful part:

• Poor performance with Fusion 360. The scanned meshes were heavy enough to make the software a bottleneck.
• Uncertainty about the mould releasing from the 3D print. A print is not a mould-making surface, and it doesn’t behave like one.
• Complex 3D forms mean complex scaffolding. The more interesting the shape, the more support material it needs — and the more the print fights you afterwards.

---

The project is primarily visual. The full documentation — process map, side projects, print files and the finished work — is in the PDF below.