Audrey Large’s practice interrogates the materiality of the digital image, transforming fluid digital simulations into tangible, impossibly smooth 3D-printed objects. For Hot Dipped: The Frog and the Sacrificial Skin, she turns her critical eye to the chemical substrates of digital fabrication itself, engaging with the industrial process of hot-dip galvanisation. In this conversation, she discusses how a 19th-century search for the “life spark” within matter informs her approach to technology, protection, and the latent vitality hidden within industrial and digital workflows.
Nadine Botha: Audrey, your work is often described as an inquiry into digital imagery and its materialisation. For this project, did your focus shift towards the actual chemical processes that make this materialisation possible?
Audrey Large: I have always been interested in the perception of digital matter and the materiality of images, for example the first photographs were imprints of light on light-sensitive chemicals and on metal or paper supports. The history of image fabrication is based on chemical transformation. Images always have a materiality, including digital images, and I like to explore this in my process of translating images into objects. For example, when I use SLA 3D-printing, I like the idea that within the making process itself, digital files harden through UV Light into tangible objects, which in turn become light bulbs diffusing light in a lamp.
NB: You chose to work with a galvanising company, a significant shift from your usual studio practice. What drew you to this specific industrial process?
AL: I was invited by Martina [Muzi], and from the beginning, I knew the theme was the chemical industry. She did onsite research in Romania, identifying different factories and companies, and proposed several to me. I chose a galvanising company. Initially, I wasn’t very familiar with this way of working. I usually work digitally in my studio—it’s a crafty, hybrid, digital way. So, outsourcing a very material process to another country was a new challenge. I started by looking into the history of galvanisation.
I found it fascinating that this process originated from the experiments of Luigi Galvani, an Italian scientist searching for the “life spark” or “animal electricity.” He experimented with frog legs and different metals, discovering that applying two different metals made the leg contract. For him, this was proof of a vital life force. This was during a time of strong vitalist theories. So, this chemical process emerged from a quest to prove the vital force in matter. That same process was later industrialised, leading to the invention of the battery by Volta and ultimately contributing to our mechanistic, industrial world.
I found it compelling that the history of this chemical process encapsulates the entire transformation from a vitalist to a mechanistic worldview. My approach became: I’m working with an industrial factory that produces industrial parts. How can I reuse this technique to reintroduce a vitalist spark into the object? My answer was to do this by introducing the hand and the digital. I drew parallels between mysticism and digital theory in matter, and thinkers like Erik Davis who analyse the digital world.
NB: That’s interesting because your previous work seems to live very much in the digital world. You speak about how something esoteric becomes an industrialised chemical process. Do you see parallels between the chemical industry—akin to alchemists turning lead to gold—and the way the digital world channels esoteric ideas into something physical?
AL: Yes. Both digital infrastructure and technologies are products of mechanistic thinking, and they also produce a mechanistic world. But in between, they imbue our material life and our thinking with a kind of mysticism, a spirituality. There’s an aura to it, something we cannot grasp that feels alive. In my work, I try to use the digital not in a standardised, mechanistic way, but to inject a lot of sensitivity and a human touch. When I craft a file, when I sculpt in 3D, I try to imbue the forms with sensitivity and aliveness. It’s a way of counteracting the machine. The shapes aren’t computer-generated; they are hand-generated but enabled by the computer.
Looking at the history of galvanisation, what I found interesting is that it wasn’t invented industrially. It came from a moment of shift when the inventor was still thinking within vitalist theories. So, this industrial process contains a seed of vitalist thinking that later turned mechanistic. Moreover, hot-dip galvanising involves dipping steel into a molten bath of zinc. It’s not just a coating process; there’s a bonding that transforms the structure of the steel, creating an alloy and changing the metal’s properties. On a chemical, microscopic level, there is a binding, an interrelation, a metamorphosis of the material itself.
NB: The concept of “sacrificial protection” is central to galvanisation, where the zinc layer corrodes to save the steel. How does this metaphor resonate with your view of the digital age?
AL: It’s a story of transformation and protection, not destruction. The zinc sacrifices itself through a porous, active process. In our digital world, we build infrastructures of connection—like the first galvanised telegraph cables—that contain both protection and a hidden cost. I try to protect the “life spark” in my work by imbuing digital shapes with sensitivity and an imperfect gesture, creating a moment where a dialogue between the human and the material can happen.
You can see this when we look at a microscopic image of a galvanised metal part. You see a zinc layer on top, a steel layer inside, and in between, an alloy where the materials bond. The zinc acts as a protective layer against corrosion; it corrodes preferentially to protect the steel. It sacrifices itself.
NB: So you’re almost talking about zinc as a living entity. You cite people like Erik Davis, who talks about an energetic field of consciousness, and Galvani, who saw a life spark. Do you think this personified humanness is inherently there in technology and chemical processes, or is it something we project onto them to understand them?
AL: I wouldn’t say it’s animistic or about projecting humanness. Vitalist theory isn’t about animism. I reference Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter” because she looks at the vitalist life spark not only in animals and humans but in all matter—even rocks. Our industrial world and the scientific revolution removed this vitalist layer. I think about the aliveness of things as a special strength or power inherent in all matter, which has its own energetic field. My intention is to bring back this life spark into objects through the digital.
Galvani was trying to reanimate dead bodies; his experiments led to stories like Frankenstein. There was a moment when society believed there was much more aliveness in things, before the industrial world stripped that away. The idea is to turn it around—to reintroduce a narrative of sacrificial protection, alloy bonding, and material interrelation into the shape of an object.
NB: In your text, you use this to ask a question about now: what remains to be protected? What are we sacrificing in our digital age for the sake of connectivity and progress?
AL: I’m also a user of these technologies—I use them in my practice but also in my personal life. It’s not about rejecting them. But when I create, I try to channel as much sensitivity as possible into the material and the form. I try to protect the life spark, the sensitivity, the imperfect gesture. In that shaky, imperfect moment, there can be a dialogue between the human and the material. I try to find and expand that moment. Galvanisation embodies this idea of protection—it’s an anodic and cathodic reaction where one layer sacrifices itself to protect the other. It’s not an enclosed protection; it’s porous, active.
NB: It’s interesting because galvanisation protected the underwater telegraph cables that formed the earliest global network—the foundation of the internet. How does layering this material history onto our digital present change our understanding of technology?
AL: It’s a story of how a process and a material bonding can lead to both interconnection and destruction. New technologies always contain both. The development of the global network and underwater cables brought hidden structures and materialisation, enabling even more mysticism around digital technology. The telegraph, for example, introduced the idea of transmitting information immaterially, which led to stories of energy and magical transmission. It gave people an imaginary, a layer of magic on top of digital technology. Galvanisation occupies a very interesting position in that sense.
NB: Vitalism is now often seen as a debunked theory, a pseudoscience like alchemy, yet Galvani’s work was incredibly influential. How can these supposedly obsolete ideas influence us in the digital age?
AL: I sometimes feel our way of thinking is not grounded enough in spirituality. Vitalist theories may have faded in relevance, but for me it’s a fascination around this kind of thinking as opposed to the mechanistic thinking that followed it, rather than going back to this exact ideology from a past century and rejecting computers or mechanistic things.
It is also interesting to try and use these theories not at the usual scale of my workshop production, but to infiltrate a factory that produces on a large scale and is attached to a real industry.
NB: This project seems to strip away the layer that separates the chemical, industrial, mechanical world from the organic world.
AL: Everything is chemical. Everything is a transformation of matter. The galvanising process is amazing—it involves high temperatures, dipping one metal into another molten metal, changing its structure, creating an alloy with new properties. Electrons are moving and changing. There’s an alchemical layer to it.
NB: You’ve spoken about destruction as a neutral force, not necessarily bad. In Eastern spirituality, destruction and creation are part of a cycle, neither good nor bad. Is that something you’re exploring?
AL: Definitely. I try to remove boundaries and dichotomies in my thinking. For me, everything is in transition or cycle. In the chemical process, I don’t see destruction. I see two materials meeting, bonding, alloying, and one dissolving through porosity to protect the other. It’s a story of transformation, protection, and porosity. Dissolving or corroding is a protective process—it’s positive. There’s no split.
NB: Your work always has a liquid, alive quality. Even before this project, you seemed interested in animating the digital, charging it with a sort of “animal electricity”. How does this project expand those ideas?
AL: Usually, my work is very liquid. I work a lot with perception—using surfaces and materials that interact with light, so the object changes as you move around it. I try to create a moment where you don’t know what you’re looking at—whether it’s heavy, real, or not.
For this process, it’s different because there are many uncontrolled factors : the inclination of the piece when dipping, the type of steel employed, all can affect the outcome.
Usually, my materialisation step is very controlled; I want the object to look exactly like my file. Here, I have to make something in metal first, and then the galvanising process decides the surface. There’s randomness.
This project tells a story of protection and sacrifice between zinc and steel. I am collaborating with two companies based in Timișoara: a hot-dip galvanising factory and a 3D-printing facility capable of producing steel parts. Drawing inspiration from the etchings of Galvani’s experiments and the iconic image of the frog leg (an organic, liquid-like form acting as an electrolyte between two charged metal parts activated by touch) I am developing a piece whose structure translates the interrelation of metal and the organic. The project takes shape as a balanced object in which delicate 3D-printed steel elements structurally hold galvanised heavy metal sheets. The printed steel acts as the living, essential “frog,” and the galvanised elements as the sacrificial skin that protects and completes the circuit of vitality between them.
