TOPOTiLE

Abstract

One of my main objectives with my ceramic art is to create objects with qualities that would often be considered counterintuitive or unattainable with clay. I utilize standard plastic 3D printing to develop and create unique tools that aid in the precision required for complex mechanical systems. Most recently, I have been using a clay 3D printer to print gears, levers, ratchets, ball and socket joints, brackets, and othermechanical elements that are incorporated in my pieces. I purchased my 3D clay printer with funding from the Undergraduate Scholars Program at MSU for a summer research project in which I proposed researching the application of ceramics in machine systems. The piece featured in this journal is titled “TOPOTiLE” and is a result of my investigation in clay 3D printing. TOPOTiLE is a three-foot-by-three-foot ceramic tile art piece composed of 121 tiles. I created this piece for a contest in which the winners’ works would be permanently installed in the new School of Computing building. The blue topography tiles are all 3D-printed from clay. The light blue glaze on the topography is composed of a wild clay that is harvested from a location just outside of Helena, MT. The outer border tiles are slab-built and stamped with a six-by-six numbered grid, which was how the land was sectioned when Montana was first settled and still exists today. The border is glazed in a checkerboard pattern, which is a reference to how Montana was initially divided when the railroad received half the land. I spent around five to six hundred hours on this project, most of which was working in the software to get the printer to behave exactly as I wanted and to be very repeatable in order to achieve consistent results over the course of printing all forty-nine tiles. This level of involvement in the 3D-printing process was totally new to me. I learned by experimenting with software settings, observing the results, and adjusting them in real time. I taught myself CAD tools including Blender, Cura, Tinkercad, and Rhino. Adapting an ecosystem of tools and processes designed for plastic 3D printing and CNC milling to work with clay has been challenging, but that difficulty has pushed me to develop a much deeper understanding of the material’s behavior and limitations. TOPOTiLE has been acquired by MSU and will be permanently exhibited in the new School of Computing building. It will be available for viewing after this building is completed, sometime in the summer of 2026.