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A World Forms in Whispers
Sculpture, Installation
2025
Size: 3m x 4m x 7.5m
Materials: Aluminium, silicone, sea-water, agar-agar, sugar, water kefir, butterfly pea flower tea, fresh water, gelatine, glycerine, sodium alginate, calciuym chloride, arduino, 12V electric pump, brass nozzles, lemon juice, salt, bacteria, yeast, plastic sheets, wood panels
Wien
Transformation
Day 1 Day 3 Day 6 Day 9
Project Description
Narrative
Experience of the Work
Existing as a living ecosystem, the installation engenders a series of relationships between machines, caregivers, and microorganisms which transform the sculpture over time.
The organic materials contained within the installation have been used, misused, or displaced through colonialism and climate change, along with the microorganisms and the sugar they are fed by. All of these materials are used to heal humans, yet over time slowly become toxic as they ferment, questioning what aids life and what destroys it.
Through the sculpture I was able to confront the fear of difference within me as a queer, mixed race person who is alive due to technology. Existing as an ecological mirror, the installation probes the limits of care and destruction, asking if our fear is one of transformation through interconnection.
This sculpture, along with the one in A Child Forms in Time, acts as the skeleton and body of my avatar in the film We Share a Mother. Though the film might depict the future, it is based on memory which is contained in the other species and histories we are made of.
The body of this avatar slowly decays and becomes absent, while the relationships and memories which formed it survive and evolve. What is left are the microorganisms, technologies, and ecologies which have sustained my own life.
Though as this body breaks apart it replicates itself to survive, generating new organisms and environments. The sculpture in A Child Forms in Time is representative of this replication, as a new skeleton emerges whose body too lies absent, yet whose microbiological climate lives on.
One body starts to decompose and decay, changing the environment it exists in, while the other starts growing and renewing, merging with the ecosystem it lives in. These bodies become the same, each staying alive through the other as they try to remain as they were, while losing what they used to be.
You enter a building. You smell something floral, something fermenting.
You follow the smell. You enter a room.
You see a giant skeleton, reflecting light. It lies in a pool of bright blue fluid.
Its skin, or membrane is transparent, gently moving as if blown by an unforeseen force. This membrane doesn’t cover the entire skeleton, only parts, as if the creature it was before has molted and left, leaving these reflective bones and small pieces of itself.
You walk closer, drawn by the smell and the light passing through it. Drawn by its stillness. You feel a dampness in the air as you get closer. You see what look like transparent eggs covering the skeleton and skin. They hold tiny, glistening, blue, pink, and golden orbs. Some have escaped and fallen in the pool beneath.
Light flickers through the blue water. In these patches of light the water seems to turn purple.
You see that the bones are hollow. They are in fact metal. Some parts of the skin look artificial, while some look organic. It is hard to tell which is which. They are entwined.
Suddenly the metal bones vibrate, sending ripples across the water. You notice transparent tubes coming from the water, pulsing like veins. Blue water courses through them, flowing through the skeleton, flowing through the air into tiny nozzles suspended above. You look up.
You feel rain. Small droplets fall from above onto the skeleton. The skin starts to dissolve. More orbs fall into the pool beneath.
You are surrounded by bones, by transparent skin, by light, by water.
You leave as it rains.
You come back the next day, and the next. The smell of fermentation is stronger.
The skeleton and water pool it lies in is still. You go closer. Something feels off. You don’t know what at first. Slowly you realise the colour of the water has changed. It is slightly darker, yet more grey. Less bright. More purple.
You walk between the bones. More skin has dissolved. Some of it is slightly brown at the edges, curling like the pages of a forgotten book.
The rain comes again. The smell gets stronger. You almost cant bear it. You leave.
You come again, though more time has passed. You hold your nose upon entering. The smell is of something rotting. You stay back. You wait for the rain. There is no blue left in the water pool. It is all grey, with ribbons of pink stretching through it. All of the organic skin has dissolved, leaving only what is artificial. It looks natural, but you feel it is not.
A sense of loss comes over you. It overwhelms you as the rain appears. You feel enclosed in the ribs of the skeleton. You feel enclosed in a creature that is rotting, whose spirit has left, whose body is gone. All that is left is a corporeal, mortal sense of decay.
The smell is too much. You run. You cannot stay a second more. The sound of water follows you.
You don’t come back for a long time. The feeling repulses you. Though slowly, softly, a feeling emerges. One of calm. As if in a temple. You have to go back one last time.
You enter a building. You smell… nothing.
You see a giant skeleton, reflecting light. It lies in clear water. Its skin has been removed.
It has been cleaned by some unknown entity, preserved. You feel strange, as if you miss the life in it, the death surrounding it. That cant be you say to yourself. That was disgusting. Yet you realise that however disgusting, however repulsed you are by the sense of decay, there was still life.
You send a silent prayer to the life that once was. You send a silent prayer for what remains.
You leave, holding the memory of what lives.
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