Glass & Cloth
Immersive Digital Artwork • 2024
There is a tension in nature, a feeling of frustration between growth and safety. This piece uses a hard material for the flower’s stems together with thin sheets of material to create the flower petals.
Combined with a mono-color lighting and slow and gradual movement, Glass and Cloth conveys the message that we can either grow or be safe, never both.
The Illusion of Safety
Using an unforgiving, fragile material like glass for the flower's stems represents the rigid boundaries we place around ourselves.
While these structural foundations provide a sense of protection and structure in a chaotic environment, they ultimately lack the flexibility required to bend into new shapes or embrace the winds of change.
Process & Simulation
The core conceptual challenge was capturing the slow, agonizing feeling of friction between the cloth petals and hard structural bindings. Developing simulations within Houdini allowed us to accurately portray the gradual struggle for movement against extreme constraints, iterating from technical rigging to final motion studies.
The Vulnerability of Growth
Contrasting the rigid glass is the delicate, thin cloth material of the petals. They represent the desire to expand, to blossom into unknown territory. The cloth attempts to stretch and unfurl, pushing against the mono-color vacuum and slow pace of the environment, a desperate urge for vibrancy chained down by an insistence to stay safe.
Styleframe Gallery
