3D-Printed Hanging Installation

A client came to us with an unusual brief: a whole household’s worth of everyday objects, every one of them warped. Colanders, cups, oven gloves, coat hangers, slippers, cutlery, a shower hose, a frying pan, all the ordinary things you stop noticing, remade so they look as though they are melting or bending in the air. We 3D modelled and printed the entire set, and the finished pieces hang from near invisible thread in a darkened room, a frozen cloud of distorted domestic life.

Distortion by design

The distortion is not an accident of printing, it is the whole point, and it was built into every model before anything reached the printer. Working from the artist’s concept, we redrew each object in 3D and pulled its geometry out of true, stretching a cup into a lean, slumping a slipper, bowing a frying pan, so that each item reads instantly as itself and yet is clearly wrong. Getting that balance right, familiar but unsettled, is a modelling job as much as a printing one.

An inventory in white PLA

Every piece was FDM printed in plain white PLA, which strips the objects of colour and brand and leaves only their shape to carry the idea. There are dozens of them, a full domestic inventory printed part by part: kitchenware, footwear, bathroom bottles, hand tools. Keeping them all one flat white ties the collection together, so that hung side by side they read as a single work rather than a pile of separate props.

Suspended, and its shadow

Hung on fine line at different heights, the objects float free of the floor and turn slowly, and a light set inside the cluster does the rest. It throws every warped handle and spout across the gallery wall as a sprawling tangle of shadows, a second and larger version of the piece drawn in grey. The 3D printing made the objects, but it is the hanging and the light that turn a set of distorted household things into an installation you walk into.