metramorphosis
visual artist, director/animator, interaction designer
Metramorphosis is a multidisciplinary game installation that explores motherhood as a metaphysical interplay between the Other and Ourselves. Blending experimental animation, game design and spatial design, Metramorphosis is a participatory maternal experience that transcends all demographic boundaries, a de-gendered and de-politicised space that transforms "mother" from marginalised actor to universal action.
Born out of my own journey through pregnancy and parenthood, Metamorphosis is a labour of love in dialogue with our fraught historical moment. Much like animation, motherhood is driven by motion, transformation, and the aesthetics of change. It is to give birth to and be birthed into a continuous cycle of mutual creation, evolution, and obliteration, living in radical relation to another, ever-changing being. Still, it's hard to wax poetic when we're seeing sexual and reproductive freedoms under global attack, propelled by cultural anxieties over gender expression, bodily autonomy, declining birthrates, and economic destabilisation. Caught between the homophobic misogyny of pronatalist tech-bros and trad-wives on one side, and our moral fight to transcend reproductive essentialism as women and queer people on the other, the very idea of motherhood can seem quaint, even regressive.
And yet no other human experience so perfectly embodies this urgent and essential truth: that our borders are porous, our lives are co-authored, and the Other is interwoven with the very fabric of ourselves. Maternal experience is not one of duality or co-existence, but of mutuality and co-creation. Here, the maternal body becomes both a universal metaphor and (r)evolutionary force, resisting those that would devalue, dehumanise, and propagandise it as an object of political control.
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The Metramorphosis installation will premiere at The Dowse Art Museum in Te Whanganui-A-Tara (Wellington), Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 2026, followed by an exhibition at Pah Homestead in Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland) in 2027. The interactive experience will also be distributed as a standalone game for mobile platforms.
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As a visitor moves from one Pod to the other, shifting perspectives and reflections create a parallax that seems to change the very composition of both the space around them and their place within it.
THE INSTALLATION
The Metramorphosis installation is itself like a metaphorical maternal body, comprised of two sculptural spaces: the Head Pod and the Body Pod. The Head Pod houses the interactive game on two touchscreens, where 1-2 players can play solo or collaboratively. Meanwhile the Body Pod creates a communal viewing area, where a single-channel animation loop is projected over a vibrational soundscape; this alternate, inclusive experience is unconstrained by time pressure, user ability, or touchscreen availability.
Metramorphosis is designed to be, both literally and metaphorically, a reflective space. The Head and Body Pods are constructed from flat planes laser-cut into figural shapes, tinted on one side and mirrored on the other. These reflective planes unfold through the space like slices of frozen motion, an abstracted body of unfurling limbs and fasciated forms. Their overlapping reflections create an ever-changing collage that blurs the boundaries of all bodies within it, interweaving the audience with the animated screen.
ANIMATION: VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
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: STORYBOARDS
click arrows to advance
Page 01
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Page 01
ANIMATION: WORK IN PROGRESS
linework only
INTERACTION & GAMEPLAY
The Metramorphosis game is played by an individual visitor, two individual visitors, or two collaborative visitors simultaneously. The game controls are simple and intuitive, yet produce surprisingly complex variations in their effect. Using only single taps on the left/right of screen, or dual taps on both left/right together, players create alternating moments of convergence and divergence to progress. When two visitors play collaboratively, single taps are executed individually, while dual taps must be executed together. To protect the experience of each visitor, the choice between individual and collaborative play must be made at the start and agreed by both visitors; an individual’s playthrough cannot be interrupted or joined by another without consent.
Generally, a single tap on the left will control elements on the left of screen, and likewise for a tap on the right (as one might expect). But as figures on screen morph, multiply, and abstract, these simple controls produce increasingly complex and surprising results. The simplicity of the controls keeps interactions grounded, ensuring the air of mystery never turns to confusion.
A brief video below demonstrates how single and dual taps progress through an early interactive sequence. Hand icons on the left and right indicate when a single or dual tap are executed.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Metramorphosis was conceived in the shadow of an enduring, unfortunate truth: to be seen as a subject worthy of serious artistic inquiry and aesthetic consideration, motherhood faces a steep uphill climb. Each aspect of Metramorphosis’ multidisciplinary design is sensitive to the need to surmount, circumvent, or disarm its potential audience’s unconscious resistance to its subject.
Its core idea – that what we perceive as “Other” invariably echoes through our most essential selves – resonates deeply with the co-authorship of experience and dynamic relation to the (encoded) Other at the heart of games. So while I primarily work in linear filmmaking, I felt Metramorphosis demanded an interactive approach. Moreover, I saw a unique opportunity to leverage the visceral appeal and enticement of game design, a call of intrigue and invitation to target my most coveted audience: non-mothers of all genders, ages, and backgrounds. In a gallery context, this draw can be especially powerful for children, who become drivers of (often male) parental engagement. Here lies the potential and promise to reach an audience that may never otherwise seek out work about motherhood, and who might unexpectedly find themselves not only reflecting on it, but reflected in it.
In some ways, Metramorphosis mirrors aspects of my identity in the world, the shifting borderlines of being multi-ethnic, queer, both born from and joined in a mixed-faith marriage, first generation in my home country and now immigrant in another. It also embodies my life in this unique moment as a new mother, reborn into a sphere of perpetual motion where one must, as in animation, embrace the aesthetics of change.
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