John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

forms of digital production might aid the development of more sustainable
forms of craft practice.
This project came out of the Autonomatic 1 symposium run at University
College Falmouth early in 2005. This [slide] lists some of the issues that the
Autonomatic competition sought to address, the specific questions I attempted
to address are at the top.
I’ve been working with digital technologies for quite a number of years on and
off, from the perspective of a maker/craftsperson/sculptor. I have also been
interested in the integration of craft practices into architecture. So, I wanted to
try to work with a related industry, to see how my skills as an independent
maker that uses digital technologies may impact on their work practices of a
company that makes ornamental plasterwork and uses predominantly very
traditional craft processes. I also wanted to look at how my practice as an
independent maker – as Julian flagged up earlier – might be made more
sustainable by finding some sort of practice that involves working in
collaboration with industry without being a designer just embedded within one
company.
Hayles and Howe are a Bristol based company. They make this sort of thing:
cornicing, ceiling roses, strapwork ceilings – everything from domestic, small
scale stuff to large scale, multi-million pound restoration projects and new build
tends to be retro stuff. You can see here that apart fro the use of silicone
moulding rather than gelatine moulding and other minor stuff that their
practice hasn’t changed hugely, certainly since the Nineteenth Century, and
perhaps before then. So this is the sort of stuff that they would routinely
produce, this is Sting’s music room ceiling which they produced, which is a new
design, but very much within a genre - using very traditional, hand modelling
skills and moulding and casting.
I approached the Managing Director and described who I was and what I
wanted to do. I wished to undertake a number of small scale projects that
investigated using different forms of digital production technology, and to see
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