Melton

Lumen & Logic

A single sculpture of thick felt, photographed on a studio sweep: a hidden mass wrapped and crossed by broad flat panels of one material, some bending away into the air on hard creases, some rolled into open tubes, all of them cut from stock of one thickness. Every part in the picture is one primitive — a sheet, meaning a circular-arc cross-section swept along a spine and given thickness — and the two things a sheet can do are the two ways that arc and that spine can bend. The cross-section’s turn takes a flat strap through a shallow curl to a closed tube with a visible mouth and a darker inner wall, so a tube is not a different object but the same one rolled further, and the arc length is exactly the sheet’s width however far it rolls. The spine is the integral of a bend rate, so a crease is not a discontinuity but a short run held at the tightest radius the material allows — the same radius that limits the roll — which is why every fold in the picture has the small rounded ridge that felt has and paper does not. Sheets are planted on a hidden ellipsoid that is never drawn, hug it for a distance of their own choosing, and then release into free air where gravity bends them, so the object reads as cloth wrapped round something rather than as limbs attached to a body. Nothing is painted back to front: the picture is resolved in a depth buffer, which is the only way a strap can pass behind the mass at its root and in front of it at its tip. One soft light does everything — a broad wrap-around diffuse with no specular anywhere, a hemispheric ambient gated by screen-space occlusion so the crevices under overlapping panels carry the depth, a faint fibre lift at grazing angles, and one shadow map that serves the object and the paper behind it alike. The sweep is geometry, not a gradient: a floor curving up into a wall, lit by the same light, which is where the background’s fall-off and the shadow pooling under the object come from. Colour is the shared palette sorted into a luminance ladder and read by the light model, warm in the key and cool in the fill, so the same object comes out cream, charcoal or terracotta depending on the preset. A two-octave grain and a slight fibre fuzz along every silhouette go over the finished frame. No outline, no specular, no flat fill and no mark anywhere that is not a lit surface.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm