From clay to a finished surface

Petrides Public Sculpture brings every stage of making into one studio, from modelling with live sitters to hand finishing, for closer control of quality and time. Digital fabrication and handwork are used together, in a dialogue between the hand and the machine. The steps below follow one portrait, Thalia, modelled on the artist’s mother, from the first question to the reworked print.

I. The question: why

Every work begins with what to make and, more importantly, why. The “why” must be strong enough to give the sculpture its life. Here it was a series of oversize portrait busts based on members of the artist’s family, using live sittings and historical photographs: a way to share history and culture with a wide audience while seeking to understand those closest to him.

II. Research and precedent

Research into ancient Greece, which he studied as a Classics major at Harvard, led back to the great collections of Greek sculpture. As a touchstone he chose a Thalia in the Vatican Museums, which gave the new portrait its name. For the sitter he turned to a black-and-white photograph of his mother in her twenties, taken in post-war Greece. A likeness was not the goal: the aim was a psychological study of a young woman in war-torn Europe.

III. Clay, by hand

Blocks of clay become a bust over days and weeks, covered each night with a wet cloth to keep them workable. The portrait was neither a copy of the Vatican Thalia nor only a likeness. In the artist’s words, it was “image-finding, not image-making”: much changed as he kept reworking the clay.

IV. 3D scan

When the clay had “arrived somewhere”, a 3D scanner recorded its surface as a point cloud, a set of data points in space. Software turned the points into a mesh, a surface of triangles: a digital object that can itself be sculpted.

V. Digital sculpting

In Blender, proportions are refined and alterations that would take a day in clay take seconds. When the model is right, it can be enlarged to several times the size of the clay with a few keystrokes, then prepared for fabrication.

VI. Printing in recycled PETG

The digital portrait returns to the physical world through additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, on machines in the studio. For the portrait busts, the material is recycled PETG harvested from discarded medical packaging.

VII. Re-sculpting

The print is firm enough to take added material yet soft enough to cut. The artist reworks it with whatever the piece needs, from epoxy clay and plaster to foam and wood. If necessary it is scanned again, reworked digitally and printed anew.

VIII. Metal, patina and pigments

The reworked surface is finished by hand with metal coatings, patination using acids, and pigments. These layers bring colour and depth to the portrait while retaining the marks and textures of the sculpting process.