Portal Into The Multi-Species: Ori Orisun Merhav
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Gallery Corridor
The Schoolhouse
Ori Orisun Merhav is a young pioneering artist and material researcher recently graduated from the internationally established Design Academy Eindhoven. The uniquely designed installation asks the question: What if tiny insects were our architects? The woven insect canopies are envisaged as a portal - a space of transformation and transition. Palm tree fibres are threaded into a structural body and converted into a new composite material with insect-produced resin. Like an ecosystem, the materials support and change one another: the soft fibres become rigid, the resin becomes a skin, and together they form an unfamiliar hybrid organism.
The installation is tailored to the architectural buttresses of the gallery and welcomes the visitor as they enter the corridor, the glowing amber light draws you into the space. Organic, branching forms suggest that something is growing from the walls, rather than constructed. Orisun plays with seduction as a natural strategy - like flowers enrapturing insects, these strange organisms invite our gaze, provoking questions about what is organic, what is fabricated, and ultimately questions our understanding of contemporary design.
The metal structure is finished with shellac. The use of this experimental insect resin has been a central thread in Orisun’s practice. Her studio has developed unconventional techniques and technologies that revive and transform this ancient material and consider its potential beyond its familiar applications.
Rather than placing nature and architecture in opposition, this installation proposes a more entangled relationship, one in which insects, plants, materials, machines and humans participate in the act of making. The portal becomes a threshold into another material logic; where growth, transformation and fabrication overlap, and the boundaries between organism and artefact, nature and culture, the grown and the made begin to dissolve.
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Artist
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