Most 3D artists talk about their software. Serwah Attafuah talks about the time she saw preserved saints in glass coffins at the Vatican when she was ten and how it permanently rewired her understanding of what art could do to a body. She talks about the bill she keeps pinned next to her workstation, not because of the amount on it, but because of the feeling it triggers while she’s building a scene. She talks about playing death metal guitar when a render isn’t cooperating, using the distortion as a kind of somatic reset until the creative block cracks open. And then she goes back to running fifteen programs at once like it’s nothing.
Attafuah works from Dharug land in Western Sydney, where she builds what she calls “surreal cyber dreamscapes” and “heavenly wastelands.” In practice, that means entire 3D civilizations constructed from the wreckage of others: classical marble ruins next to neon-soaked cyber-cities, crumbling temple floors under synthetic fog, figures wrapped in cybernetic armor floating through landscapes that feel both sacred and post-apocalyptic. She refers to the whole aesthetic as “art soup,” and she means it. Renaissance chiaroscuro, Rococo maximalism, cyberpunk dystopia, and Asante spiritual tradition are all processed through Cinema 4D, OctaneRender, DAZ 3D, Zbrush, and CLO3D simultaneously. The pipeline is enormous. She’s been building it since she was five, when her mother, an Italian/Dutch graphic designer, taught her Photoshop by letting her cut family faces onto Lord of the Rings characters.
She still paints, technically. The medium changed but the method didn’t. She calls her process “frankensteining”: she renders a high-resolution 2D character, imports that flat image back into a 3D environment, and lights it as if it were a real volumetric object in the scene. It flattens the z-axis on purpose, keeps the final image from reading like a video game screenshot, and leaves you looking at something closer to a layered oil painting that just happens to exist in three dimensions. She swapped turpentine for GPU-accelerated path tracing. The glazing logic carried over.
Her 2024-2025 commission The Darkness Between the Stars, exhibited at ACMI in Melbourne, is a five-screen video and sculptural installation. Cybernetic women warriors rise from the burning ruins of colonial slave castles modeled on structures like Elmina Castle, built in 1482 in her father’s hometown. The figures nod to Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa, who led the Ashanti uprising against the British in 1900. Attafuah and her father built the physical viewing frames from repurposed e-waste, then painted them in ceremonial gold. The frames reference Agbogbloshie in Accra, one of the world’s largest electronic dumping grounds, where migrants burn toxic Western hardware to extract copper and iron for pennies. No generative AI anywhere in the production.
She tried that once, actually. She attempted to train an AI model on her own body of work to see if it could replicate the output. It couldn’t. Her read: the machine has no way to synthesize Ashanti ancestry, borderline personality disorder, death metal catharsis, and a ten-year-old’s memory of glass coffins at the Vatican into a single coherent voice. The range isn’t there.
She sold through Sotheby’s Natively Digital auction in 2021, rendered the 3D visual identity for Charli XCX’s “1700 B.C.,” and has since pulled commissions from Nike, Mercedes-Benz, Valentino, and Adobe. At the 24th Biennale of Sydney in 2024, curators put her 3D renders in the same room as William Strutt’s Black Thursday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a 173-year-old oil painting of colonial Australia on fire. She makes her next one the same way she makes all of them: fifteen programs open, a death metal guitar within reach, and a pile of scrap paper that only makes sense to her.
Written by: HQ
