Art project emphasizes sustainable production practices.
Italian art collective Cracking Art was founded in 1993 with the mission of exploring “the relationship between natural and artificial reality”. In practice, the collective has become known for its over-sized installations, which introduce brightly colored animals—made from reclaimed plastic—into a variety of urban environments, from 23 marmot sculptures dotted around the Natural Science Museum of Italy’s Aosta Valley, to a range of brightly hued snails strategically placed around Milan.
While the art group is best known for its use of plastic as a medium, it has also started working with metal, leveraging large-format additive manufacturing to create animals from recycled steel.
Cracking Art’s latest project was completed in collaboration with Dutch 3D printing company MX3D, perhaps best known for producing a canal bridge in Amsterdam using its WAAM technology, and Novametal, a Swiss manufacturer of metal wires. Using high-quality steel wire from Novametal and MX3D’s M-Metal 3D printing tech, Cracking Art has created a series of 3D printed turtles, which according to MX3D “highlight the synergy between advanced WAAM technology and artistic vision, demonstrating how innovation can push creative boundaries while advocating for sustainability.”
The AM company goes on to say: “By integrating robotic WAAM with digital and computational design, artists not only gain new creative possibilities but also benefit from sustainable production practices that minimize material waste and reduce lead times.
This project seamlessly merges art, technology and sustainability, demonstrating the transformative potential of WAAM across multiple industries.”
The turtles are not the first time that Cracking Art has worked with metal 3D printing: in 2022, the art collective created a larger-than-life wolf 3D printed from recycled steel. This piece, aptly called the Steel Wolf (Il Lupo d’Acciaio) was completed in collaboration with Italian steel fabricator Cogne Acciai Speciali.
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