Crowd Funding the Rygo

I was contacted by a young gentleman named JF Brandon as he is attempting to raise money in order to produce a three dimensional print of a sculpture. He was wondering if the technology was of interest to me to reproduce my sculptures. I am going to wait to see how his current project sculpture turns out before I decide.

I agreed to help spread the word of his project, and I had never heard of Crowd Funding before. There are several of these types of crowd funding sites, such as Kick Starter, but JF is using one called IndieGoGo. These type of crowd funding sites are meant only for culturally based projects. If a musician wants to independently release a CD of music, or a writer wants to publish a book, they can use these websites to raise capital to get their projects launched. Instead of hiring a venture capitalist company, artists are using the Internet to find investors for their projects. The budgets are usually not more than $10,000.00, so crowd funding sites are perfect to satisfy the market for small budget projects.

JF has partnered with LA based sculptor, Bathsheba Grossman and they want to produce what they are touting as North America’s largest 3D printed stone sculpture. Ms. Grossman has created a pleasant abstract form, titled “Rygo” that would be extremely difficult to carve from a block of stone, as there are many interior negative spaces unreachable with tools. While they claim the Rygo will be carved from solid stone, the process of printing uses stone dust that is glued together, layer by layer, with resin. The way I see it, the sculpture is manufactured and isn’t really solid stone. Bathsheba is advertising the print will be made of concrete.

However, the process is intriguing and if it flies, I am interested in seeing what the finished sculpture will look and feel like. At that time, I can decide whether pursuing this form of technology for my sculpture is viable and marketable.