Wearing Difference, Extravagantly

Kelly Knox never thought of herself as disabled. The British model and activist was born with only one hand; her left arm ends shortly below her elbow. That didn’t stop her from riding a bike, learning to swim, washing her own hair—all the same activities that her able-bodied friends did. So when she was first fitted with a prosthetic limb, she found it clumsy and awkward.

“Without the false arm, I felt completely abled,” she told an interviewer in 2013. “When I was wearing the false arm, that disabled me, because I wasn’t able to do stuff that I could do without it.”

This paradox is in part what inspired her to work with Lewes, England–based artist and prosthetic designer Sophie de Oliveira Barata to design a false limb—not to blend in with “normal” people, but to stand out from them.

The result is Materialise, one of dozens of artful prosthetics created by de Oliveira Barata. The bottom half of the arm was molded from a digital scan of Knox’s right arm and crafted from ultrarealistic silicone, which is de Oliveira Barata’s primary specialty.

The top half consists of nearly two dozen interchangeable parts held in place by magnets—steel, rock, earth, wood, moss, oil, cork, wool, bronze, rhodium, gold—that can be swapped out depending on Knox’s mood.

“It was just the idea of changing different sections of your body, depending on your feeling,” de Oliveira Barata explains. “What materials resonate with you, depending on what you’re wearing or how you’re feeling?”

A Team of Craftspeople

After de Oliveira Barata and her client agree on a basic design, the artist assembles a group of craftspeople with various specialties to help her execute the project. “Each limb is completely unique, so I’ve got different processes. I collaborate with different people with different skill sets,” she says.

One important member of every team is the prosthetist charged with fitting the new limb. Most often, that’s someone brought by the client to marry a medical grade function to de Oliveira Barata’s more artistic process.

Many of her projects, including Materialise, were constructed with the help of Dani Clode and Jason Taylor. Clode is a designer at the Plasticity Lab at Cambridge University, where she’s part of a team exploring how the brain responds to augmented body parts. Taylor teaches digital design at the Manchester School of Architecture, where he has developed a new ultralight, manipulable artificial hand.

Taylor explains that the collaboration for Materialise involved a hybrid approach to process. The project began with digital scans of both of Knox’s arms, which were used to make a 3D printed lightweight plastic “chassis” to contain the interchangeable parts. Each material featured on the arm was processed according to its properties.

“I’ve always been an advocate for mixing analog and digital to create a kind of hybrid methodology,” he said. “In our process, you’ve got elements of the traditional where we’re doing things like casting, using drills and band saws and various hand tools. But we combine it with the precision you can now get with CNC machines, 3D printers, and laser cutters. I think it’s just drawing out the strengths of both.”

Thus, the wood and cork inserts were turned on a lathe and hand finished, real moss was encased in resin, while other elements were 3D printed in various media.

“It was a particularly tricky project,” Taylor says. “We needed something that was lightweight enough to support all of the materials, also strong enough to support all of the materials, but something with tolerance tight enough that the whole thing doesn’t all just fall apart.”