A NEW WAY OF MAKING SCULPTURE
Jonathan’s large-scale bronze sculptural self-portrait entitled Homage to Paolozzi (Self Portrait) marked his first foray into sculpture and represented an evolution in the tradition of creating self-portraiture, produced by using cutting-edge technology.
This was the first sculpture to be designed with innovative virtual reality software and then realised in bronze as part of a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition, From Life, examined how artists’ practice of making art from life is evolving as technology opens up new ways of creating and visualising artwork.
For over 18 months, Jonathan experimented with various innovative technologies related to image making, including virtual reality and advanced 3D scanning. This led to a partnership with the VR painting software Tilt Brush, which lets users paint in a 3D space using spatial technology. Yeo also worked with leading optical company OTOY, whose pioneering technology is used by leading visual effects studios in Hollywood including George Lucas and Warner Bros. Using their advanced LightStage scanner, a highly detailed 3D scan of Yeo was created and then imported into the software. In a ‘virtual life room’, Yeo was able to create a self-portrait based on this digital scan. Yeo’s creation was then directly 3D printed from the Tilt Brush software before being cast into Bronze by Pangolin Editions, one of the world’s leading sculpture foundries in Gloucestershire, enabling his virtual brushstrokes to be captured and realised in permanent sculpture for the first time.
This marked a new approach to creating self-portraits since, as for the first time, Yeo produced works derived from three-dimensional scans in virtual reality rather than looking in a mirror or working from photographs. By making solid structures based precisely on the kind of gestural marks which painters would normally use on canvas, this platform opens the door to an entirely new process, both for artists already working in three dimensions and those, like Yeo, with little or no previous experience of sculpture.
The piece is named after sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, in whose former studio in Chelsea, London Jonathan is based.
“As someone who has always wanted to work in three dimensions but never learnt how to do it in the traditional way, it is exciting to have helped create a new process which could probably be best described as a hybrid of painting and sculpture. The reason to use self-portraiture was to demonstrate how you could employ 3D scanning to look at yourself in a way that hasn’t been possible until now. What’s exciting is that the combination of this, along with the latest virtual reality and 3D printing technologies, is potentially a new way of making sculpture and one that might inspire other artists from a range of disciplines to have a go too. I hope these pieces not only show how artists can make use of new technology in unexpected ways, but also offer a speculative glimpse of how we all might use them in the future.”
Jonathan Yeo
LISTEN to Jonathan speaking to John Wilson about this innovative work, on the BBC 4 Front Row Programme
Read a Q&A with Jonathan here on the Google Arts & Culture website
For exhibition information https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/from-life