Digital Stone Project

“The Foragers” explores the invisible collisions of bodies through a distortion of micro and macro scales. The white marble sculpture combines an architectural pillar shape with molecular fungal forms. Protein models sourced from scientific databases disrupt the flat geometric surfaces of the base and column with undulating biomorphic masses. Proteins that encode how a fungus grips, pits, or discolors the structured matter of marble are situated with others that dissolve the conditions that make fungal extraction or staining possible. These combinations present a play on the conventions of allegorical stories of classical hand-carved marble sculptures with a biotechnological twist where scientific 3D models rendered in robotically milled marble depict a molecular “microdrama”. The narrative implications, however, remain open to interpretations of destruction and deterioration, as well as coexistence and homeostasis, emergence and growth. The robotic carving of the marble introduced machine path artifacts and glitch patterns that imply their own biological references. The waves, peaks, and valleys along the edges of the carved molecules are evocative of transition patterns found at many scales of growth in fungi. Together the elements of the sculpture create a fluctuating experience across multiple scales of reference.

Creating the work in the Garfagnana valley at the foot of the Apuan Alps further animates themes of interconnectedness in an ecological system where fungal spores from a nearby forest might travel on an insect’s wing, finally landing on carved marble sculptures. This new sculpture is part of “Cryptic Lineages”, Laura Splan’s emerging body of work that considers extractive processes at the intersections of biology and technology. “The Foragers” explores extraction materially through the process of robotically carved marble sourced from a Tuscan quarry; biologically through fungi that deteriorate marble and poetically by problematizing the line between foraging and extraction, survival and sustainability. As “Artist-in-Research” at Open Fung, the development of this project included conversations with scientists Rachel Linzer and Rolando Perez that traversed the science and politics of boundaries, foraging, discovery, and exploration across magnitudes of time and space.