Victoria Valdes is the manager of the 3D Design Lab at the Department of Art in Ruffin Hall and helps students and faculty materialize their 3D printing visions.

When most people think about 3D models, they picture a layered plastic piece, maybe a toy or a pencil holder, something that has a simple shape and obvious meaning. The objects being created, printed, cut, pieced, and sculpted at Ruffin defy that simple expectation. Some of them are representational: 2023 graduate Zhiwen Xu scanned and then sculpted a realistic miniature model of a human heart and, with my help, transformed it into a four-foot hanging centerpiece for her show as part of a multimedia mobile. Some of the models are much more abstract. Graduate Amelia Parizek, during her fourth year in 2022, created a scan of herself and modified it into a two-foot sculpture that took parts of her scanned body and altered them into long, attenuated forms wrapping around one another like an eldritch ballet dancer. Some of the models are much more abstract. Graduate Amelia Parizek, during her fourth year in 2022, created a scan of herself and modified it into a two-foot sculpture that took parts of her scanned body and altered them into long, attenuated forms wrapping around one another like an eldritch ballet dancer.

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