metramorphosis
visual artist, interaction designer, animator
You stand inside a room awash in a resonant soundscape of breath and tone. Before you, a figural sculpture of life-sized mirrored planes fills the space with multiplied figures, abstracted anatomy, and unfolding limbs – a paradoxical body at once frozen and in motion. At its head is an enclosed pod, ringed with faces that seem to look both outward and inward, that invites you to enter with the soft glow of its inner screen. At the far end of the space, glimpsed through the unfolding figure, a large-format projection animates with abstracting, metamorphosing figures. Flashes of your own mirrored reflection mix with those of the animated screen, the fragmented figures, the other viewers. Boundaries of screen, self, and other blur and bleed into strange new forms, calling out a simple invitation: Look. Breathe. Touch.
"metramorphosis" is a multidisciplinary, interactive, dual-channel animated installation that will premiere at The Dowse Art Museum in Te Whanganui-A-Tara (Wellington), Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 2025, followed by an exhibition at Pah Homestead in Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland) in 2026. Combining elements of hand-drawn animation and experimental game design with spatial design and large-format sculpture, it explores metaphors of the maternal body at the borderspace between Self and Other – a site of mutual creation, transformation, and obliteration. Its embodied, gestural controls are somatic and intuitive, while its uncanny, looping animations are atemporal and evocative. The result is uniquely sensual and participatory experience, a co-creation between both artist and audience.
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Although most fully experienced as an installation, the multidisciplinary nature of the piece allows for multiple formats. To increase its reach and impact, "metramorphosis" will also be distributed as a standalone interactive piece playable on mobile or browser (a "video/art/game" of sorts), as well as an animated short film.
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At its core, "metramorphosis" (re)captures and (re)frames the maternal body as a site of social technology and collective power. It explores the metaphysics of matrescence as a sensual, and essential, encounter between Self and Other, a universal metaphor that transcends boundaries both internalized and externalized. It is a call to question and challenge the borders we impose across our social, political, and emotional landscapes. Through interactivity and immersion, it creates a participatory and technologically-embodied space for the feminine, the queer, the childlike, the maternal – which is to say, the universal.
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The room-scale "metramorphosis" installation comprises two interlocking spaces: the Head Pod and the Body Pod.
THE INSTALLATION
The hexagonal Head Pod houses the interactive experience, intended for a single user at a time. Inside, a touch screen is encircled by four one-way mirror panels, which multiply the screen content and the user in a chamber of reflections. Acetate planes in the shape of profiled faces surround the structure, appearing as a continous, lenticular, fasciated head.
The Body Pod extends backward from the Head Pod and through the center of the room. Built from overlapping planes of acetate suspended in dimensional space, the Body Pod arranges figural fragments, unfolding limbs, and multiplying bodies into a single composition of a figure paradoxically frozen in motion. It encircles a projection screen, which displays looping animations pulled from the interactive experience. The Body Pod's outward surfaces – those facing the Head Pod – are surface-treated and translucent, while its inward surfaces – those facing the animated screen – are mirrored. Within the mirrored viewing area, the audience's own reflections are collaged alongside the animation itself.
As the audience traverses the room, the planar sculpture appears to unfold, taking on new shape and form from every angle, such as in the rough pre-visualization video below.
ANIMATION: VISUAL & COLOR EXPLORATION
The hand-drawn animation of "metramorphosis" blends the figural with the abstract, its imagery rooted in the biological, metaphysical, and metaphorical maternal body. Its simplified shape language and soft gradient colors draw inspiration through decades of feminist painters – from Agnes Pelton, to Judy Chicago, to Loie Hollowell.
ANIMATION: FULL STORYBOARDS (LINEAR)
click arrows to advance
Page 01
Page 02
Page 20
Page 01
ANIMATION: MOTION TESTS
linework only
INTERACTION & "PLAY"
For its installation, "metramorphosis" is designed with only two simple inputs: a left/right "single tap" and a simultaneous "dual tap." By tapping on either the left or the right of screen, players can advance individual figures and actions; by tapping both left and right together, players can merge figures together to produce surreal and surprising results. This simple control scheme is intuitive and easily understood by audiences of all ages and experience levels, while being adaptable to any number of formats and platforms (touch-based or controller-based).
Generally, a single tap on the left will control elements on the left of screen, and likewise for a tap on the right (just as one might expect). But as "metramorphosis" progresses, figures on screen morph, multiply, and abstract. Even as the player's input produces increasingly strange results, the simplicity of the controls keeps the interactions grounded.
Below is a brief video test of how single and dual taps could be used to progress through an early interactive sequence – not the most elegant progression, but rather one that shows the most variety in combination and outcomes. The hand icons on the left and right indicate when a single or a dual tap are activated:
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Motherhood inhabits a fraught landscape in which one’s body is not one’s own, one’s labors are perpetually devalued, and one’s very identity is submerged, appropriated, and politicized. To become a mother is to embrace instability, as much in the spirit of birth as of rebirth, newly formed and re-formed as a being of perpetual motion, metamorphosis, transformation. It is to live with and within an Otherness that is also oneself.
Through participatory interaction, “metramorphosis” re-captures and re-centers the metaphorical maternal body as a site of collective power and reflection. It reframes the encounter between self and Other not as one of duality and co-existence, but of mutuality and co-creation. In this immersive space, maternal experience becomes a kind of social technology, a force of compassionate imagination with a power that transcends the maternal body itself.
Outside motherhood, no situations exist in human experience that so radically and so simply bring us face to face with that emergence of the other; I like to think that in our human adventure, we can encounter ‘the other’ – sometimes, rarely – if, and only if, we, men and women, are capable of that maternal experience, which defers eroticism into tenderness and makes an ‘object’ an ‘other me’.
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Catherine Clement & Julia Kristeva