When New York shut down in March 2020, and I started baking bread and drinking too much, I wanted to build a piece of furniture while isolated within the apartment. I needed something that could be created without any tools and wouldn’t be overly taxing mentally. I originally wanted to put together something like the college-dorm-grade, cinder block and pine plank shelves, only with found objects bought via ebay in lieu of concrete blocks. Ultimately, browsing ebay was getting in the way of doomscrolling, so I shifted over to 3d printing it myself. Continuing my fascination with replicating objects of perceived historical value that themselves have already been copied many times over by Roman sculptors working from lost Greek originals, and which have also most likely then been looted by Western museums, I downloaded a bunch of 3d models of scanned heads from antiquity via the British Museum on Sketchfab. As an added bonus, each head took about approximately three days to print, so I realized my ambition of keeping myself occupied for the maximum time with the minimal amount of effort. Factoring in all of the print errors and extrusion jams, this took about a total of seven weeks to realize. The brass shelves were spec’ed and ordered from onlinemetals.com.

The British Museum’s publicly available scan of the strong Greek Orator (and weak military fighter) Demosthenes with his somewhat pensive, pursed lip demeanor. Note that like many other sculptures from antiquity, the British Museum’s version is a Roman copy of a lost Greek original. https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/a-bust-of-demosthenes-67fb4ea5c8f149c88658bd4a67f0008d

Each print was approx. 75-95 hours. I had nothing but time.

“Had you for Greece been strong, as wise you were, the Macedonian would not have conquered her.”

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