The 3D large-scale relief map of the Jurassic Coast is 2.5 metres in length and is based on contour patterns seen from the air and captured by LiDAR, an optical remote sensing technology that can measure the change in elevation of the landscape using pulses from a laser. The subject is England’s first natural World Heritage Site, a ninety-five mile long stretch of coastline running from Orcombe Point in east Devon to Old Harry Rocks in east Dorset. Its geology spans the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, 185 million years of the earth’s history.
I produce work that uses both subtractive and additive technologies. Subtractive fabrication is the term given to any fabrication process where material is taken away or reduced from a solid in order to reveal a new shape. This subtraction can take place using any combination of tooling techniques such as drills, lathes, and grinders, and more recently lasers and high-pressure water jets.
The traditional method for creating 3D landscape models is manually assembled plaster models. For the Jurassic Coast model I employed a CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) milling machine. CNC routing is a way of machining an object directly from CAD (Computer Aided Design) data with a sharp, fast moving tool bit. I am working with geospatial data of the Jurassic coast supplied by Dr Andy Ford, Lecturer in Geoinformatics, School of Conservation Sciences of Bournemouth University.
Jeremy Gardiner
