In 2009 Cliff Garten created a monumental interior sculpture for a new interdisciplinary research center at the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI. The sculpture, Strings, is comprised of three transparent columns suspended 77 feet through five stories, of the building's central atrium. The layering and delicacy of line work in the digital construction drawings of the sculpture inspired an investigation of this work as a two-dimensional image. The resulting work was a triptych of three 3.5 feet by five-foot digital archive prints called Strings.
He has continued the investigation of his sculptures through line drawings derived from each of his commissioned large-scale public works. This growing body of prints now includes images that are derived from the public sculptures, titled: Avenue of Light, Rhytons, Bullet and Suspect, Blue Eclipse, and Poppies. Other print series that followed are the Radiolarian, based upon digital reconstructions of etchings and drawings by the 19th Century naturalist Ernst Haeckel, and Tomos, a series of transparent botanical prints for the Oregon Institute of Technology, School of Tomography, which lead to other series of botanical prints.
