Generations : interpreting Iron Age ceramics
digital ceramics, 2025.
Generations combines generative AI with digital and traditional ceramic practice. I use generative AI tools to add to my creative process, rather than to try and replace it. This project works from Iron Age vessels (500 BC–400 AD) in the collection of Horsens Museum in Denmark, pots that were discovered from excavations at well-known sites like Hedegård as well as from farmers' fields and construction sites around the municipality.
What draws me to these vessels is their complexity. At first glance they look plain, but Iron Age ceramics were used for everything from cooking to burial rituals, and they carry regional styles, utilize varied types of clay bodies, and display decorative techniques that record who made them and where. With this work, I'm not trying to recreate these pots, but to ask what new forms can emerge when history becomes material for contemporary design.
My process brings together four kinds of artifacts: digital (the AI-generated 3D models), historical (the museum pots), machine (the clay 3D printer), and human (my own hand). I use AI in two ways: photogrammetry, to build 3D models from photographs of the museum's vessels, and text-to-3D, to generate new forms from written descriptions. These outputs are early prompts for my visual thinking, not finished designs. I then make the vessels with a combination of hand work and clay 3D printing.
Generations resulted in a series of ceramic vessels, but its more interesting result was conceptual. Generative AI works only from existing data; whatever it produces is assembled from what already exists. Rather than fight that by pushing the tools to invent, this project puts it to use, since a subject or reference rooted in the past suits a technology that can only look backward. The reconstructions of clay artifacts were never exact, but attempting to generate digital models from real-world artifacts gave the work an anchor in the physical world that prompts alone could not, and brought an entire historical archive into my studio, where it helped to shape the forms I made.
Special thanks to ceramicist Anna Andersen and Horsens Museum for their collaboration in this project.
What draws me to these vessels is their complexity. At first glance they look plain, but Iron Age ceramics were used for everything from cooking to burial rituals, and they carry regional styles, utilize varied types of clay bodies, and display decorative techniques that record who made them and where. With this work, I'm not trying to recreate these pots, but to ask what new forms can emerge when history becomes material for contemporary design.
My process brings together four kinds of artifacts: digital (the AI-generated 3D models), historical (the museum pots), machine (the clay 3D printer), and human (my own hand). I use AI in two ways: photogrammetry, to build 3D models from photographs of the museum's vessels, and text-to-3D, to generate new forms from written descriptions. These outputs are early prompts for my visual thinking, not finished designs. I then make the vessels with a combination of hand work and clay 3D printing.
Generations resulted in a series of ceramic vessels, but its more interesting result was conceptual. Generative AI works only from existing data; whatever it produces is assembled from what already exists. Rather than fight that by pushing the tools to invent, this project puts it to use, since a subject or reference rooted in the past suits a technology that can only look backward. The reconstructions of clay artifacts were never exact, but attempting to generate digital models from real-world artifacts gave the work an anchor in the physical world that prompts alone could not, and brought an entire historical archive into my studio, where it helped to shape the forms I made.
Special thanks to ceramicist Anna Andersen and Horsens Museum for their collaboration in this project.
3D-printed and hand sculpted earthenware, mineral pigment, wax, twine. Various dimensions.
Set detail.
Mug vase and Window jar; 3D printed and hand sculpted earthenware, wax and mineral pigment, 2025. 15 x 15 x 35 cm and 18 x 18 x 20 cm.
Detail, Mug vase.
Fracture pot and Ear urn; 3D printed and hand sculpted earthenware, wax and mineral pigment, 2025. 20 x 20 x 26 cm and 19 x 19 x 31 cm.
Detail, Ear Urn.
Wavy jar and Standing jug; 3D printed and hand sculpted earthenware, wax, mineral pigment, twine, 2025. 20 x 19 x 24 cm and 20 x 20 x 38 cm.
Iron Age clay jug fragment, from the collection at Horsens Museum.
Iron Age clay flask, , from the collection at Horsens Museum.
Iron Age clay pots, from the collection at Horsens Museum.
Iron Age clay jug, from the collection at Horsens Museum.
Iron Age pot, excavated in Horsens, DK.
AI-generated 3D model, made using photographs of the pot.
Fracture pot; 3D-printed and hand sculpted earthenware. 20 x 20 x 26 cm.
Iron Age pot, excavated in Horsens, DK.
AI-generated 3D model of a “Danish Iron Age pot excavated in Horsens, Denmark.”
Window jar; 3D-printed and hand sculpted earthenware, wax. 18 x 18 x 20 cm.