Limited Addition
A fabricator and marketplace for metal sculpture
Limited Addition logo
This was my thesis project for the MS Engineering Design Innovation program at Northwestern University and was completed over the course of 9 months.
The principle that guided my design of this service was to increase the accessibility of metal sculpture. Limited Addition is a word play on the means of fabricating limited edition sets of sculptures used in the service - 3D printing, a form of additive manufacturing.
Sculpture is a medium that I personally connect to and I know how razor thin the margin of success is for the sculptors who give us these pieces to enjoy and connect to. This work is for them.
Accessing Art
We all know what art is capable of doing for us:
Help us through a breakup.
Access bottled up joy in beauty - there is a reason this is the number one most sold postcard in the world.
Receiving recognition and solace for something that is difficult or painful to articulate and externalize, like the loss of a loved one.
This is by no means a comprehensive list and I’m sure you can think of what your favorite song, poster, or small token from a trip makes you feel.
So let’s examine how we access the art that helps us experience these feelings. A little exercise for you: how many songs have you downloaded or streamed to listen to? How many posters or prints have you bought to hang on your wall? Howbout bought a sculpture?
If you are like the vast majority of people I interviewed, then your answers trend from large to very small or none. Why is this?
Well, for a song, a digital file is so enormously accessible that all it takes is a click of the download button and it’s in your ears. Once we move to the physical world, a picture can be printed easily and cheaply enough and you can enjoy it on your wall for as long as you’d like. A sculpture, though? It is a three dimensional medium by its nature and has to be experienced in person. Its nature also means that it is more difficult to produce.
Getting Hands-On
…and I should know just how hard it is to produce because I immersed myself in the artist’s experience by going through the entire process of creating metal sculpture. For my sculpture, I made a decorative knife for a talented friend graduating from culinary school. This is how it works:
A pattern is made from another material like foam or clay and represents the shape you ultimately want to make out of metal.
A mold forms the negative space into which you pour molten metal. In my method, I used the foam pattern to press into a “green sand” (a mixture of sand and an adhesive) mold, which is then cured to harden it.
An iron furnace is built and the mold has steps taken to prepare it for casting. Molten (>1000 °F) metal is poured into the mold and allowed to cool overnight.
Excess metal is cut from the piece and many more hours are invested grinding, sanding, and sealing the metal to bring it to a finished state.
The casting process I used is the absolute simplest form of many complex methodologies used in highly specialized professional foundries to create cast metal sculptures both large and small.
As you begin to get the idea of, making metal sculpture is an enormous investment, both in time and money. It also being a process that benefits from economies of scale, most sculptors tend to have multiple signed and numbered copies made as a limited edition set (as opposed to an open edition, where there is no cap to the number that can be produced). Though each individual piece in a set may be less unique and thus less valuable than a one-of-a-kind piece, many sculptors find that an edition in total is worth more than a one-off piece. This economy of rarity is balanced against many other factors to determine the number of pieces to produce in an edition. How in demand the sculptor’s works are, the meaning and intention of the piece, and the means by which the artist’s works are found and bought are all considered.
Finding Art
The other side of the coin is finding art. Same exercise as before: In the last year, how often have you browsed for art or crafts on an online creator marketplace like Etsy? Howbout gone to a local art or crafts fair? Traveled to visited an art gallery?
All these places have in common the wonderful emphasis on forming a personal connection with the artists and their work, but they become harder and harder to access just by their nature - online, comes to you locally, and in a fixed location that may not be near you.
What This Means For The Sculptor
Let me introduce you to Mala, an artist. She is not a real person, but an amalgam of many very real stories from the sculptors in my research and my life. Mala finds that metal sculpture is the medium which best represents what she tries to express through her work. She has just finished the pattern for a new piece and now it is time to have it fabricated.
Mala knows that when it comes time to put this new piece she’s been working on out there for patrons to buy, she’ll have to have to have it made and it is the foundry that she knows she’ll have to call to get the job done.
“If you’re in a gallery then you’re IN. The ‘golden light’ shines on you. Great.
...but for all the rest of us…”
And for Mala, an up and coming sculptor, the gallery system is the gold standard for success when it comes to having her work seen. She values that it provides her with an unparalleled experience connecting with patrons that would ultimately purchase her new piece. Patrons come to a gallery knowing that the gallery has curated works for them to peruse and Mala knows that the gallery is going to represent her story and the story of her works, immensely important factors in the sale of her art. After all, 90% of the art she has ever sold has been to people she knows through the networks established at galleries she attends.
Yet, she also knows that the capacity of the galleries in her network is limited and she is anxious that she won’t have the chance to have her work be seen by the right people. Many of the galleries in her area also have not yet adapted to the increasingly internet-based market for art.
“I got a quote to fabricate a limited edition set of my piece
…but how many can I really sell?”
This means that when she makes that original call to the foundry to have her pieces made so they can be shown at all, she is experiencing a high degree of anxiety. The production of metal sculpture is a large upfront investment and one that one that she shoulders entirely, sometimes many months before she anticipates she could even see a sale, a sale that given her understanding of the gallery system, can be a disturbingly uncertain one.
Design Objectives & Requirements
The principle that guides Limited Addition is to increase the accessibility of metal sculpture. Sculptors like Mala are the ones who give us these pieces to enjoy and connect to and as we’ve come to understand through her eyes, the mission of Limited Addition is twofold:
Lower the investment risk of producing metal sculpture
When fabricating works of art, we have to maintain the high quality standards that cast metal sculptors expect. The foundry system is a trusted institution and for good reason, having perfected the craft over thousands of years. The way we overcome the high anxiety associated with producing cast metal sculpture, we have to lower the investment risk involved so that the artist is not shouldering the entire burden upfront.
Broaden possibilities for patron-sculptor connections
To help the artist make sales, we have to appreciate the significant role of the artist-patron connection while providing new avenues for connection. The connection with an artist’s story and those of their works is of particular importance and we have to be cognizant of the new digital mediums over which patrons are expecting to find those stories.
Proposed Solution: Metal 3D Printing
The answer to our fabrication needs comes from the world of prototyping and manufacturing: 3D printing. 3D printing builds up a 3D object, making one little piece of it, layer by layer. You may be familiar with plastic 3D printing from your local library or maker space, but you may not be aware that 3D printing is also available in metal.
Though it is not competitive with traditional manufacturing methods in many realms, like structural performance, the primary advantages in the speed and economy make it a technology that could make a real difference in increasing the accessibility of fabrication for sculpture.
3D printing is fast and cheap to set up and while it may be more expensive on a per-part basis, the low quantities most sculptors produce limited edition sets in means that 3D printing remains competitive with casting on a per-part cost basis. Additionally, once we do have it set up and in the system, there is no additional set up cost any time you choose to print a part off, whether it be the first or the hundredth.
THIS is what unlocks lowering the investment risk to the sculptor since we can print each individual piece in a set and only incur the costs of that individual piece when a sale has already been made.
Introduction
User Objectives:
Understand Service Offering
Testimonials
So let’s see how we make that happen and do it through the eyes of Mala, our metal sculptor extraordinaire.
Mala, as a veteran of sculpture fabrication puts great faith in the established foundry system. After learning about Limited Addition, its alternative means of fabrication would be immediately suspect to Mala. Her fellow artists’ positive experiences being the best evidence available, she’ll look for and listen to the testimonials that Limited Addition puts front and center. There are established quantitative metrics that have to be met, too – the produced works being of “archival” quality, for instance – and that data would be available.
Quoting
User Objectives:
Understand Cost Model
Comfort With Process
Mala, being interested by a new paradigm of production for her works, fills out the requested information and receives an estimate back. She understands that she’ll pay an upfront cost just once and then she can order a copy to be made whenever she like and it will always be the same price. As someone with a high degree of intimacy with the way her works are made, it reassures Mala to see that there is some breakdown of what goes into the costs without overburdening her with the details of how they contribute to the cost.
Scanning/Digitization
User Objectives:
Localization Flexibility
Having approved the quote, Mala has the flexibility of choosing whether to have a 3D scanning service come to her if her piece can’t be moved or for her to bring her piece to the scanning facility.
As her piece is being digitized, she can give live feedback at this crucial step.
Sidebar: The Digital Advantage
Once Mala’s piece is digitized and into the Limited Addition system, we’ve now opened up a whole world of possibilities because digital manipulations are so much cheaper than physical ones.
In a traditional process, such as Lost Wax Casting there are few opportunities for input and limited chances to make modifications. With Limited Addition, once Mala’s piece is in the system, she can change its size, geometry, or material, make touchups, and more.
Physical Proofing
User Objectives:
Reduce Production Risk
Mala feels this benefit first when she elects to order of a lower fidelity plastic 3D print, which helps her proof the piece physically before committing changes to a full-fidelity copy. For instance, fixing the leveling of the bottom here.
A full fidelity copy is the equivalent of the foundry system’s artist’s proof, which is typically the first copy that comes out of the mold. Mala knows that it is a symbolically significant piece because in the old days, the first copy to come out of the mold was the best quality. Though nowadays that isn’t as true and particularly not with Limited Addition, artist’s proofs are an important holdover that Limited Addition would want to maintain.
Creator Marketplace
User Objectives:
Increase Artist-Patron Exposure
A full-fidelity artist’s proof is made and finished so Mala has material to post up on the Limited Addition creator marketplace. She has her own page with details about her story and has listings of pieces she has ready to be made. If there are member pieces of a limited edition set available, that work has a listing of its own, like this one, with its own story and details. Mala anticipates meeting new patrons through the avenues provided on her page and her listings. When a sale is made, the patron pays Mala through the portal and Mala approves the new piece to be fabricated on demand and ultimately shipped to the patron.
Digital Connections
User Objectives:
Connecting to Artist’s Story
On top of chat and email functionality that exists in other creator marketplaces, Limited Addition brings in the more personal and live connections that Mala values in the existing gallery infrastructure. This is immediately recognizable as valuable to Mala because the overwhelming majority of the pieces she has ever sold have been to people she’s already gotten to know.
And this make sense because for all of us, art is all about a connection. To someone else, to yourself, an idea, a story. With Limited Addition, Mala can forge the conduit for that connection. It’s up to you to go and find it.
‘Love’ by Alexander Milov. Burning Man 2015