Story

This fruit bowl was designed for my wife's PhD advisor. She wanted to give him a small token upon graduating. We decided a fruit bowl would fit the bill, and I got to work designing something appropriate. I wanted the piece to be tectonically disciplined (he's a lover of the fine arts), sturdy (he has a rambunctious young family), and also gesture to his specialty (computational neuroscience) without being too on the nose. ​

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I 'grew' the pattern making up the bowl's body using a reaction diffusion process; the same one that governs the formation of folds in our own brains. Unlike most pieces out there that exploit this process, which though regular is non-repeating, I gave this one bilateral symmetry as a nod to the brains' hemispheres. 

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The bowls' legs are short and cute, trying to be as non-intrusive as possible. They presented inordinate difficulty when it came time to print the piece, however. After four failed prints taking over a week, I custom-designed supports, which ultimately proved successful. But at four days, and requiring lots of post-processing, it was not a print for the faint of heart. The differing properties of the bronze and dichromatic plastics (pictured above) required further fine-tuning. The effort was mercifully rewarded, in the end, as it brought home how the same geometry could take on radically different emotional valences given different materials.