Ashley D Goodenough: Study Slots

Concept: My laser cutting study slots are made up of six designs that are all organic in contrasting ways. I chose to design three types of bone: a vertebra, a femur, and a pelvis. I also chose to design three other things from nature that are less animal and more mineral and/or flora: a diatom, a grapefruit slice, and a leaf. I intended to get different functions out of different shapes. For example, the femurs would be lengthy, structural, and weight-bearing. The diatoms would be able to string together to make up continuous lines. The grapefruit slices would act like joints. The pelvis would be a splitter, where I needed to insert a "fork in the road." I wanted an interesting array of organic objects so that I could use them to construct body parts or animal-like structures from the pieces, Frankenstein-esque. I ended up creating an arm, a pair of legs, and an abstract spinal form that was inspired by snake skeletons.

Modeling:  I used interpolate points curves, conics, Join, CurveBoolean, Array, Move, BoundingBox, and Analyze:Length to build my inner and outer cut shapes for my study slots. I was originally planning on doing three whole 24x48 birch wood panels of these, so that I would have a lot of bones to work with and potentially build something quite large, but I didn’t want to take up too much laser cutting machine time from other people. My layout is a bit unorthodox because I intended to do two designs per wood panel back when I was planning on completing three whole panels. This snapshot is after compromising and placing a more reasonable amount of each design on a single panel. The empty corner in the upper left is where I did a test to see how I felt about the sizing of each slot and the tightness of the slot fit, both of which turned out to be too large and needed to be scaled down.

Materials: I used a .19” thick panel of birch wood that had some interesting color variation on one side. This worked out really well, especially after finishing the slots with a single layer of polyurethane, because the wood grain looks pretty dramatic on one side combined with the smoke patterns created by the laser. I think it would be interesting to continue this project on a different type of wood using the same slot designs, and use both types of wood in a single structure.

abstract spinal form: made up of diatoms and vertebrae study slots

arm (fingers to neck): made up of femurs, grapefruit slices, vertebrae, leaves, and one pelvis

pair of legs: made up of femurs, a pelvis, grapefruit slices, and leaves

This is a new composition made up of only the diatom slots. I kept going until the structure filled itself out and all the curves were complete. It's basically the final form that the slots wanted to take. It looks different from just about every angle! The following three photos are all the same build.






Bonus: two final forms combined! The shadows these make are really beautiful.