The Interview, Grey Alien Bust

Everybody knows what this looks like. Smooth grey skin, a skull far too big for the body, a chin that tapers away to nothing, and those eyes. No pupils, no whites, nothing to read.

It has only looked like this since about 1987

Before that, people who reported meeting something reported an enormous variety of things: tall and hairy, small and hairy, robotic, human but wrong, luminous. The accounts had almost nothing in common with each other.

Then Whitley Strieber put a big-eyed grey face on the cover of a book in 1987, it sat in the window of every bookshop on earth for a year, and the descriptions started to agree. Not gradually. Quickly.

Which is the interesting part

The reports became more consistent after the picture became famous, not before. Whatever you make of that, it is the same thing that happened to Dracula and the same thing that happened to the bunyip: a single popular image quietly replaced a hundred competing ones, and now it is the only version anybody can picture.

We are not in the business of deciding what is true. We are in the business of making the thing you can picture.

What the sculpture does

The anatomy is the whole point of this one. A long thin neck with every tendon and vessel standing out under the skin, sloping into narrow shoulders and a chest where the sternum and the rib ends show through. It reads as a real body that a real skeleton is holding up, which is exactly what makes it uncomfortable to look at for long.

The eyes are worked as smooth unbroken domes wrapping round the sides of the skull, set under a heavy lid that follows them all the way round. In bare white they are blank, which is worse than black.

And the expression is nothing at all. Not hostile, not curious, not frightened. Just looking, and waiting for you to finish.

Left unpainted

Bare bone-white, so the anatomy reads as carving. A hand-finished version is coming, and the eyes are the part that will change it most.

The numbers

• Printed and finished by hand in Australia.
• VISITOR 005, and WEIRDO 011. It is a Visitor for what it is and a Weirdo for what shape it is, so it is filed under both. One piece, one print run, two registry numbers. Neither number will ever be given to another design.
• Height to be confirmed.

Looking after it

The neck is the thinnest thing we make and it is holding up the heaviest head. Lift it by the shoulders or the base, never by the skull, and do not carry it one-handed. Dust with a soft dry cloth. Out of direct sun, because PLA softens around 60 degrees.

Ordering one now

Made to order. 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.