The Arrival, Grey Alien Statue

VISITOR 002 arrived standing up, which none of the others did, and has not sat down since. The registry calls it The Arrival, on the grounds that nothing else about it has happened yet.

Three hundred millimetres of standing grey

The classic one: the long skull, the black almond eyes, the hands that are mostly finger. Printed as a full standing figure rather than a bust, so you get the posture as well as the face, and the posture is the part that gets to people. It stands slightly wrong. That is deliberate.

Left unpainted on purpose

Paint would turn it into a toy. Bare filament keeps it looking like something on a shelf in a building nobody can name, and the flat surface shows the anatomy across the ribs and the forearms far better than a gloss coat would.

The numbers

• 300 mm tall. Waist height on a desk, eye level on a low shelf, and considerably bigger than people picture when they read the price.
• Printed in Australia and finished by hand.
• VISITOR 002. That number belongs to this design and will never be given to another.

Looking after it

PLA gives up around 60 degrees, so keep it out of parked cars and direct summer sun. The fingers are the fragile part: dust it with a soft dry brush, not a cloth. Indoors only.

How big it actually is

Three hundred millimetres is taller than most people picture when they read it. On a desk it comes up past a monitor stand. On a low shelf it is at eye level, which is where it earns its place, because the whole effect depends on it being able to look back.

Where it belongs

A study, a shelf of odd things, a room that has already accepted it is not going to be tasteful. It is also the piece people pick up without asking, so put it somewhere that can survive being handled.

How it is made

Modelled from scratch, printed here on our own machines, then cleaned up, finished and packed by hand. Nothing is outsourced and nothing is cast, so every piece carries faint layer lines and no two come out quite identical. We could sand those out. We would rather you could see it was made than see it was manufactured.

PLA, which is a corn-starch derived plastic. It is rigid, it holds fine detail better than almost anything else at this price, and it has one weakness worth knowing: it softens at around 60 degrees. A sunny windowsill in February is the one place it should never live.

Ordering one now

Everything here is made to order. Nothing sits in a box waiting, which is why you are not paying for a warehouse. Order it and yours goes into the next batch, usually within a fortnight, and you are emailed when it goes on the bed and again when it ships.

Change your mind before it is printed and we refund it in full without asking why. After that you still have every right you have under Australian Consumer Law, which we cannot exclude and would not want to.