DESCRIPTION

This experimental series emerged in 2014, as PLA filament printers were becoming standard tools in universities. The work does not oppose the precision of the 3D printer, but pushes it into an unstable peripheral zone: printing no longer takes place on a neutral ground, but onto a stretched, elastic textile.

Cut-open women’s tights were stretched across the removable metal building plate. Onto this fragile carrier, simple Euclidean forms were printed in hot PLA. The decisive factor was the calibration of nozzle distance, temperature, and printing speed: the PLA had to penetrate and embed the textile structure without melting it. Too cold or too fast, the connection remained superficial; too hot or too slow, the process destroyed its own carrier.

The work operates within a narrow technical threshold, where success and failure are separated by degrees, millimetres, or seconds. Its core lies in the precarious co-dependence of two materials: PLA, precise but spatially poor; textile, elastic but structurally unstable. Only their controlled fusion produces a form neither could generate alone.

After printing, the textile was cut along the PLA contours with low heat. The two-dimensional order of the building plate then dissolved into an unpredictable three-dimensional structure. Form appears here not as sovereign design, but as a risky material negotiation between plastic, fibre, tension, heat, cut, and time.

That the objects later collapsed through material fatigue, diminishing tension, and the limited durability of PLA and textile is not an external defect, but part of their material logic. These mini-sculptures are form-finding studies whose spatial results emerge from a largely contingent, yet technically enabled, material coupling.