Soft Machines
Large-scale outdoor sculptures exploring the bodies that make a city.
Soft Machines is a new public artwork by Ivan Morison, developed with long-term collaborator Heather Peak. It explores the bodies that make a city, and the plurality of love, intimacy and desire between them.
Installed on Hove Promenade, between sea and city, it appears as a set of monumental, embodied forms. Moving from public life drawing into communal fabrication, the project foregrounds negotiations of looking, touch, trust and becoming. It began with a citywide series of open life drawing sessions, creating shared ground from which the sculptures could emerge. The works have been developed and built with Millimetre and Making It Out, a Brighton based charity supporting people after prison. Together, agricultural materials are shaped into corporeal forms held within cocooning skins.
Rooted in Morison’s queer, relational practice, Soft Machines asks how bodies meet through gaze, desire and work, translating those encounters into raw, disruptive public forms.
A Brighton Festival Commission.
Ivan Morison
Ivan Morison is an artist working across sculpture, film and social practice, often in collaboration with Heather Peak. His work explores bodies, landscapes and materials in states of flux, and how public artworks can hold space for relation and change.
Morison makes works that act like portals—into strange ecologies, dreamlike ruralisms, and temporal states that stretch, sag, and shimmer. Earlier projects embedded questions of identity, belonging and performance beneath broader architectural and ecological narratives. In recent work, the body moves to the centre: a mutable site of transformation, negotiation and emergence. They offer gestures—towards love, towards transformation, towards a softer, wilder understanding of what it means to be in the world.
Insights Into the Artistic Process
Supported by Henry Moore Foundation.
