www.davideangheleddu.net

My artistic production gets inspiration from nature, particularly from nature sublimely described in the book Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature) of the German philosopher and biologist Ernst Haeckel. This work, carried out at the end of  1800, contains over 100 prints followed by an accurate description of animals and marine creatures: Haeckel’s study mainly focused on the observation of marine microorganisms and of the spread of the theory of evolution. These are images of astonishing beauty, which can go beyond their meaning.

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Above all I was impressed from the radiolarians’ siliceous skeletons, a component of the marine plankton, a substance present in all oceans. Plankton, a Greek term meaning wandering, presents a peculiarity: it moves only vertically, the remaining of its movement is determined by the wave motion. I found this image strongly evocative of man’s life, who is partially the author of his own decisions and who is partially in the hands of uncontrollable and uninfluencable forces.

Radiolarians inspired my first work and laid the basis of my following artistic production. Starting from primary forms, I submit them to the action of external forces which destroy them on the one hand and on the other hand give them a new shape, that is a new life.

The surface of my works is corroded. You can guess their initial geometry, but then time devours and deforms them. The result is a fragile object, like man’s life, but also a continuous becoming. The most important part of the objects I make is the missing one: their shapes resemble their skeletons, you feel that maybe the true work was the one which was before, or perhaps the one that will become later.

My artistic activity is tightly linked with technology. New frontiers were opened in the field of sculpture thanks to the new digital technologies. Nowadays sculpture can be conceived in a totally virtual environment to be built by machines using the layer by layer principle, like it happened to my works.

The bronze sculpture is made of the succession from two separate processes. The first process is the laser sintering: the virtual model is cut in layers of 0.15 mm and loaded in the laser sintering machine. A high power laser solidifies the nylon powder, layer by layer, making a physical model with precision and potentially unlimited complexity.

The second process is the lost-wax casting: this technology is basically the same as the one used three thousand years ago. The forming system, cooking and evaporation remaied the same during the last thousand years. The model is used as wax, and it is lost during the casting.

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Kunstformen der Natur (German for Art Forms of Nature) is a book of lithographic and autotype prints by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Originally published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and as a complete volume in 1904, it consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself. Over the course of his career, over 1000 engravings were produced based on Haeckel's sketches and watercolors; many of the best of these were chosen for Kunstformen der Natur, translated from sketch to print by lithographer Adolf Giltsch.

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