Body Architect Lucy McRae's TED Talk & Film 'Make Your Maker', A Food & Body Morphing Experimentation
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Make Your Maker on Nowness.com.
A crude laboratory plays host to a series of macabre experiments in this short from the burgeoning artist and filmmaker Lucy McRae. Inside, glowing comestibles drip and flow to mold bodily shapes that are then harvested, sliced and repackaged for consumption. Having featured in such publications as Dazed & Confused and Wallpaper*, as well as directing the award-winning Morphē for the skin care brand Aēsop, this latest endeavor from the self-styled “Body Architect” explores how food connects to the body, inside and out. “Everything is edible,” says McRae of her gelatinous props. “The stuff on the model’s face is inked rice paper, and the jellies on her body are molded agar agar, which is made from natural seaweed.” The impulse to show what we are turn into what we eat—and vice versa—was inspired by an encounter with Vietnamese restaurateur Nahji Chu whose outlets in the director’s native Australia merge the culinary arts with an investigation of cultural and individual identity. Taking a hands-on approach to every aspect of production, from the cinematography to the science, McRae adds a personal element to that notion of synthesis, inspired by human biology. “The idea is to create genetic manipulations,” she explains. “Eating them is a transdermal absorption.”
Lucy McRae: How can technology transform the human body? TED Talk in 6 Minutes
TED Fellow Lucy McRae is an artist who straddles the worlds of fashion, technology and the body. Trained as a classical ballerina and architect, her work – which is inherently fascinated with the human body – involves inventing and building structures on the skin that reshape the human silhouette. Her provocative and often grotesquely beautiful imagery suggests a new breed: a future human archetype existing in an alternate world. The media call her an inventor; friends call her a trailblazer. Either way, Lucy relies on instinct to evolve an extraordinary visual path that is powerful, primal and unique. See Lucy McRae website.
