Two large sculptures made of agricultural materials on Hove Promenade, with two blurred runners in the foreground
Soft Machines on Hove Promenade. Photo by David McHugh.

Tender, communal, transformative: Soft Machines at Brighton Festival

Outdoor, Visual arts

Each year, Brighton Festival invites artists to make original public artworks for our city and surrounding landscape. Soft Machines is a new Brighton Festival-commissioned series of sculptures, exploring the bodies that make a city. Developed by Ivan Morison, along with his long-term collaborator Heather Peak, these monumental, free-to-access sculptures will be found on Hove Promenade from 2–24 May. Read on to find out where Ivan found his inspiration and discover some exclusive behind-the-scenes content:

Sketch for Soft Machines
Preliminary sketches for Soft Machines.

The work began with a citywide programme of public life-drawing sessions, bringing together hundreds of participants: professional models, first-timers, couples, friends and queer communities. 

 

Soft Machines began with bodies — not as subjects to be drawn, but as landscapes in their own right. The life-drawing sessions were a catalyst: a room full of people negotiating tenderness, tension, humour, shyness, desire, exhaustion. As I watched those bodies, I realised the real material of the project was relation itself.— Ivan Morison

 

Ivan Morison stands on Hove Promenade looking up at a giant sculpture made of agricultural materials. Three other sculptures appear in the background.
Ivan Morison at Soft Machines. Photo by Charles Emerson.

Alongside the life-drawing classes, Ivan walked the Sussex landscape, meeting growers and fabricators, and taking inspiration from the land they worked with. The sculptures for Soft Machines will be filled with agricultural materials, such as hay, straw and hemp, held within layers of cocooning skins.

 

I’ve been thinking about bodies as landscape — soft terrains shaped by forces, histories, erosions — and landscapes as bodies that hold memory and time. Working with materials like straw, clay, heather and hempcrete links the sculptures directly to the ground beneath us: they are temporal, permeable, vulnerable to weather, just as we are.

Two sculptures at Soft Machines with the sea in the background. They are surrounded by runners.
Hove Promenade parkrun participants at Soft Machines. Photo by David McHugh.

For Soft Machines, Ivan is working in collaboration with Making It Out, a Brighton-based organisation supporting people rebuilding their lives after homelessness, addiction or prison. Together, they test the sculptural frameworks, stack straw and hay, and experiment with materials. 

 

Working with Making It Out brings another layer of care and transformation to the work. These are new forms made by people who are also re-forming themselves.

 

Take a look behind the scenes:

A person walks between two sculptures at Soft Machines on Hove Promenade
Soft Machines on Hove Promenade. Photo by Charles Emerson.

Brighton is a city that already understands the radical potential of bodies. Creating a work that grows directly from the people here feels not just right, but necessary. This city taught me how to be an artist and how to love. Soft Machines is my love letter in return — an invitation to look, and be looked at, and to ask how we hold one another in view and re-humanise public space.

 

Two people stand on Hove Promenade looking up at Soft Machines sculptures. One person reaches out to touch a sculpture. In the background is the Palace Pier and Brighton Pier.

Discover Soft Machines on Hove Promenade — free throughout Brighton Festival, 2–24 May.

Share your photos, and tag us @brightonfestival

 

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