Part seen imagined part: an art practice as research approach to digitally reconstructing Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Baptismal Font [dissertation]

This project explores human responses to cultural heritage destruction and demonstrates the possibilities of combining state-of-the-art heritage visualisation techniques with art practice as research methodology, a promising but significantly unexplored field. Charles Rennie Mackintosh's baptismal font (originally built for the Abbey Close Church in Paisley in 1906) is the focus of this research. The font was significantly damaged in a major fire at the Mackintosh Building at Glasgow School of Art in May 2014. It is the best surviving artefact from those that were damaged in the fire. This research tells the mostly forgotten story of Mackintosh's font through creative response, a short film entitled 'Part seen imagined part' (appropriated from an early Mackintosh drawing), critically discusses art practice as research in relation to archaeology and heritage visualisation, and reflects on the various ways humans interact with and impact cultural heritage. A number of 3D reconstruction methods and other technical processes that were used are also explained including photogrammetry, white light laser scanning, and free modelling in 3DS Max