3D Printed Memories

A series of inkjet sandstone "photographs" that render time in a tangible form. These objects depict moments and places that happened once, but that you can hold in your hand forever.

Two artifacts from the series are featured here: a group of friends climbing a rock in Mexico, and a woodshed in my grandfather's back yard.

Grandpa Dutch was 95 when he passed away. He spent his final decade turning wooden bowls on the lathe in his shed, running a local thrift shop, and feeding the ducks in his yard. When I was young, I saw him as my unstoppable grandpa; but as an adult I knew he wouldn’t be with us forever. So when my family had an impromptu reunion at his beach house in Rehoboth, DE, I wanted to capture that moment in a way that had never been done before.

I’m obsessed with memories. How fragile and multisensory they seem – we don’t just remember audio and visual "videos", we remember smells, and crucially, touch. But moments in time are impossible to grasp – they slip away exactly as they happen. Or so I thought, until I figured out a way to hold one.

My next iteration of this project was inspired by distance. I grew up in Sydney, Australia. In high school, Anuj was one of my closest friends. When I moved across the Pacific to go to Stanford, our friendship paused. As a kid I frequently relocated with my parents for their work. As an adult I have gallivanted simply because the world feels cozier if you know people everywhere. I love the itinerant life, but the flipside of having a vagabond spirit is that I hold memories tightly. Time feels effervescent at best, and tragically ephemeral at worst. So in 2018 I started figuring out how to use technology to let me hold onto precious moments. Literally, in my hands.

By that time my core group of highschool friends had dispersed all over the world. But Anuj was turning 30, and he wanted to bring us back together. So we met up in Mexico for a week that we all knew would be too short.

I had just spent the summer teaching myself photogrammetry. One afternoon I arranged us on a rock and conducted my largest scan to date: 2000+ DSLR images combined with drone footage into a three-dimensional portrait of us together before we all went separate ways.

When the print arrived, something magic happened. I picked up this sculptural “moment” and suddenly I felt close to Anuj again. I made him a second copy and sent it across the ocean. He told me that when he picked it up, it hit him like a hug.