Auriea Harvey: Ready To Die

Picture a medieval chapel with one of those glistening fonts of holy water at the door. You dip your fingers in, cross yourself, and step inside.

Ready to Die is set up like this, except the font is bright pink and 3D-printed, with silver coins sunk in its well. Life-size wooden angels, carved from birch plywood by a computer-controlled mill, guard the hallway. Their bodies ripple with lines like a topographic map.

Pass between them into a darkened chamber, where two long plinths stand at heart height. They're lined with spotlit amulets and sculptural treasures. Urns for ashes, vessels for wine and oil, classical figures. It all looks like it could have been dug up at Pompeii.

The forms are ancient, and so are some of the materials. Think clay, wax, bronze, stone. But every one is a dance between the artist and a machine. Harvey begins with 3D scans and digital models, then lets machines carve, mill, and print before finishing the objects by hand.

At each end, moving-image works glow like stained glass. In The Dance of Death, shadow dancers pirouette in a generative film that keeps reinventing itself. The altar is two slabs of plywood leaning against each other like spaceship doors, with a screen glowing and bubbling behind them. What's waiting if you step through, you might wonder.

The tools are new. The urge is old: make a vessel, a figure, a charm, something to carry us across while we wonder what it means to live, to die, and perhaps to be reborn.

Auriea Harvey (b. Indianapolis, 1971) lives and works in Rome. She trained as a sculptor, then made some of the first art built for the web. With her husband, Belgian artist Michaël Samyn, she spent more than a decade making art-house video games as Tale of Tales. Her work has since moved through 3D printing, blockchain, and computer-controlled fabrication. In Ready to Die, those technologies end up in objects that look much older than the machines that made them.