Bathsheba Grossman’s Art

Antichron

I just discovered Bathsheba Grossman’s art, and I’m hooked.

I spent a long time looking at each sculpture and crystal laser etching on her site and ended up ordering the Mega DNA crystal along with the White light LED stand. I’m pretty sure I’m going to get more at some point in the future.

About the laser crystal technique:

The points are tiny (.1mm) fractures created by a focused laser beam. The conical beam, with a focal length of about 3″, shines into the glass without damaging it except at the focal point. At that one point, concentrated energy heats the glass to the cracking point, causing a microfracture.

To draw more points, the laser is pulsed on and off. To make the beam move between points, it’s reflected from a mirror that is repositioned between pulses. The mirror is moved by computer-controlled motors, so many points can be drawn with great speed and accuracy. A typical design might use several hundred thousand points, or half a million isn’t unusual in a large block, each placed with .001″ accuracy.

Here are some other cool crystals:

DNA Polymerase

Our Neighborhood, 10 Lightyears to the Inch

A Cross-Section of the Calabi-Yau Quintic

Enough crystals for now. Check out these sculptures:

Soliton

Ora

Quintrino

The 24-Cell

The 120-Cell

Many of the sculptures are for sale in different sizes, and there’s more models than what I show here. If you’re curious about the techniques she uses to design and create the sculptures, check out this page.

For the biologists out there who would like specific proteins in crystals, CrystalProtein.com is a side project of Bathsheba and they make on-demand proteins.