>Ian Dawson

>Brain Damage V3.1, 2025, 3D printed PLA on aluminium, each column 80 x 80 x 240cm

>Brain Damage V3.1, 2025, 3D printed PLA on aluminium, each column 80 x 80 x 240cm

Brain Damage V3.1 is a large-scale, twin-columned sculpture composed of 3D-printed scans of human, animal, plant, and machine forms. Statuesque in appearance, it functions more like a musical score—a composition that unfolds in space.
Both columns begin at floor level with a pair of oversized, swollen feet, laser-scanned and printed in PLA, a cornstarch-based bioplastic. From this shared foundation, two vertical structures rise and diverge, each holding a constellation of forms: a chimpanzee bust, a mouse heart, a pollen grain, flint slices, tree bark, and obsolete machine components. Their arrangement shifts with each iteration, forming an open composition—part improvisation, part archive.
Each form is printed from a digital scan sliced into thin horizontal layers. This additive process constructs the sculpture not through mass, but through accumulated silhouettes. Like a musical staff or a line of code, each layer carries a rhythm, a breath, a pause. The work echoes Friedrich Kittler’s insight that media systems fragment and reassemble thought through inscription.
The internal aluminum framework—barely visible—consists of four vertical rods that recall the staves of sheet music. These are not merely structural: they organize the work rhythmically, marking intervals and ruptures. In this way, the sculpture becomes what composer Cornelius Cardew called a “non-verbal notation”—a form to be interpreted, not resolved.
Rather than telling a single story, Brain Damage V3.1 assembles fragments from different systems of knowledge—technical, botanical, biological, emotional. It asks what happens when materials don’t just represent knowledge but co-produce it. As theorist Karen Barad suggests, meaning and matter emerge together in mutual entanglement. What this sculpture offers is not meaning fixed in form, but meaning as encounter.
The version number—V3.1—hints at the work’s open-ended nature. It suggests a system in progress: a build assembled through iterations rather than final forms. Like a software patch or media file under constant revision, the sculpture resists closure. What we encounter is not a resolved object, but a versioned state—part memory, part malfunction, part update. As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.” Brain Damage V3.1 stands at that threshold: a sculptural score—unfinished, fragmentary, and waiting to be read.