Shane Ward

ART

High-Impact Practices Development Grant recipient Shane Ward provided a platform for students to design, edit, and build a large 3D printed sculpture through collaborative efforts.  Students collectively selected a poem from The New American Poetry of Engagement: a 21st Century Anthology. From this poem, they conceived four large-scale drawing exercises that respond to the poem's ideas. Every twenty minutes students shifted the drawings to the left until each student has worked on each drawing twice. The group considered these four drawings then voted on one drawing to translate into a 3-dimensional printed model. Student pairs work to create two virtual three-dimensional renderings. From here the only instruction is that they combine the two models together in the software, determine the scale of the object and print the sculpture in modular units on the 3D printer. The purpose of 3D printing the sculpture instead of manually sculpting is to alleviate the limitations of each individual’s physical and technical abilities. 3D printing allows the creative work of this project to be primarily intellectual in nature. The sculpture will ultimately be assembled and shown with the drawings at the Apothecary Gallery in Spring 2019.