Charlotte Dann

Artist

Charlotte Dann · charlottedann.com ↗

Based

Born 1993, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England. Lives and works in Brighton, England.

Practice

Creative technologist and maker who bridges jewellery design, computational arts, and generative practices to investigate tactility, serendipity, and materiality in digital spaces.

Now

Senior Software Engineer at GitHub on the Design Infrastructure team, working on accessibility and the Primer design system.

Raster

raster.art/artist/charlotte-dann ↗

In the set

Ceramics ↗ · 300 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Charlotte Dann (b. 1993) is a British creative technologist and generative artist based in Brighton, England. ¹ Her work synthesizes formal training in jewellery design and silversmithing with deep expertise in web technologies and computational arts, producing projects that probe how code can evoke the tactile qualities and happy accidents of physical making. ² She holds a BA in Jewellery Design and Silversmithing from The Cass at London Metropolitan University and an MA in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. ³ Prior to her focus on long-form generative art, Dann founded Hexatope, a web application that allowed users to design and fabricate custom jewellery, and developed a series of generative jigsaw puzzles that extended her interest in algorithmic processes yielding handmade results. ⁴

Her consideration of the web as a material with its own constraints and affordances began around 2018. ⁵ She observed that, unlike clay or metal, the screen-bound output of code is confined to a flat cartesian grid of red, green, and blue pixels, yet this very constraint can be pushed toward organic, imperfect outcomes that feel surprisingly physical. This perspective underpins her approach to generative art, where she deliberately introduces human-scale decision making and material resistance into otherwise deterministic systems.

"I like to imagine a person creating each piece, carving meandering lines with hand tools. By humanising the creation process viewers can empathise with the decision-making the computer has to undertake to render each piece."

Ceramics: Translating Sgraffito into Generative Form

In March 2023 Dann released Ceramics through Art Blocks' Curated programme. ⁶ The collection comprises exactly 300 editions. Each artwork simulates the sgraffito technique familiar from pottery, in which a coloured slip is applied to a leather-hard clay slab and then carved away with metal tools to reveal the clay body beneath. ⁷ A virtual hand selects implements, cuts a slab, and wanders across its surface, leaving intersecting, meandering lines whose density, orientation, and layering vary according to a carefully authored set of rules.

Ten primary features govern each output: the base clay material and its firing state (raw, bisque, or glazed), glaze colour and viscosity, stroke thickness, tool profile, mishima inlay application, placement strategy, layer orientation and overlap rules, density controls, flow-field scale, and frame margins. ⁸ These parameters interact to produce results that range from dense, almost chaotic fields to sparse, contemplative compositions. The algorithm employs vector fields driven by noise, layered stroke systems with custom overlap logic, and three.js rendering pipelines that add realistic three-dimensional texture, lighting, and glaze behaviour. Canvas API techniques further impart a hand-drawn quality to the marks. ⁹

The resulting images possess a striking material presence. Ridges catch light, glazes pool and thin, and the underlying clay colour shows through in ways that reward close inspection, much as a physical ceramic tile invites the finger. By embedding an imagined human carver inside the generative loop, Ceramics makes the computational choices legible and empathetic. Viewers sense the small decisions (tool choice, stroke weight, layer order) that accumulate into each unique surface. This humanising strategy distinguishes the project within the broader field of generative art on the blockchain, where many works celebrate pure procedural elegance. Dann instead foregrounds friction, serendipity, and the trace of a maker's hand.

The fixed edition of 300 editions aligns the project with traditions of ceramic production while exploiting code's capacity for controlled variation. Ceramics has appeared on secondary platforms including Verse Works and has been discussed in artist talks and collector spaces as an example of craft thinking migrating into long-form generative practice. ¹⁰ Its release on Art Blocks' Curated track placed it alongside other projects that prioritise conceptual depth and technical refinement over pure novelty.

Live on Art Blocks: ceramics-by-charlotte-dann ↗

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Charlotte Dann links page ↗.