Look out. Heather Dewey-Hagborg' might have 3D printed your face...

Date
8 May 2013

Brooklyn-based artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg has a pretty extraordinary artistic practice that sits somewhere between fanatic hoarding and scientific investigation. As she goes about her daily business in New York she stops along the way to collect genetic material that the city’s inhabitants have willingly discarded. Hairs in public toilets and skin on cigarette butts all form the building blocks of complex sculptural creations that Heather produces by extracting the DNA and using that information to create life-like 3D printed sculptures of her anonymous subjects’ faces. They’re weird, wonderful and genuinely haunting, but the thing we just can’t get our heads arounds is how Heather managed to persuade a laboratory to use their equipment for artistic purposes? If only there were more collaborative relationships like this between the worlds of art and science.

Above

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: Portraits

Above

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: Portraits

Above

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: Portraits

Above

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: Portraits

Above

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: Portraits

Above

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: Portraits

Share Article

About the Author

James Cartwright

James started out as an intern in 2011 and came back in summer of 2012 to work online and latterly as Print Editor, before leaving in May 2015.

It's Nice That Newsletters

Fancy a bit of It's Nice That in your inbox? Sign up to our newsletters and we'll keep you in the loop with everything good going on in the creative world.