Figure in Between, 2024: Posthuman Flesh and the Limits of Breath

Figure in Between is a reclining soft sculpture made from brown vinyl and polyester filling. Partially deflated, it hovers between states — animate and inert, seductive and abject, human and synthetic. The work explores the limits of the body as both vessel and surface, where breath becomes containment and touch turns visual. Through its glossy, liver-coloured skin and ambiguous anatomy, it reflects on vulnerability, queerness, and posthuman materiality. The figure’s stillness suggests not absence but transformation: a life form folding inward, caught between rest and dissolution — an image of tenderness sealed within artificial flesh.

  • Figure in Between, 2024
    Vinyl and polyester filling
    65 x 38 x 11 cm
    25 5/8 x 15 x 4 3/8 in
  • If the figure breathes at all, it inhales only what it has already exhaled.

    Posthuman Flesh and the Limits of Breath

     

    When I made Figure in Between, I wanted to collapse the distinctions between figure and object, body and support, surface and interior. It appears as though a bed has become its own occupant, a body folded into itself, unable to breathe or release what it contains.

     

    The vinyl surface carries much of this ambiguity. It shines with an artificial gloss — smooth, impermeable, faintly bodily. When I handle the material, it gives little back; it’s cool and sealed, almost indifferent. Its seduction is visual rather than tactile, an image of touch rather than a sensation of it. The skin looks alive but feels inert, a simulation of the living — a surface of ecstasy and denial, where appearance replaces depth.

     

    If the figure breathes at all, it inhales only what it has already exhaled. Its sealed body circulates its own used air — a self-contained system with no exchange between inside and outside. Suffocation here isn’t theatrical; it’s quiet, internal, inevitable. The figure seems to exist after animation, holding the memory of breath rather than its flow. That stillness feels tender to me — as if life might persist even without movement, and empathy could extend to the inanimate.

     

    At 65 centimetres long, the figure is neither miniature nor life-size; it feels vulnerable, a body one might instinctively want to protect. Looking down at it, I’m aware of the imbalance between viewer and object — the way care and helplessness coexist. It’s an intimate scale that invites empathy but also reveals exposure. The shared materiality between viewer and work is mediated through synthetic flesh, as if even tenderness now has to operate within artificial conditions.

  • It glistens between appetite and revulsion, sweetness and waste, pleasure and disgust.

    The colour pushes this further. The brown vinyl — somewhere between chocolate and excrement, or between skin and organ — shifts between allure and abjection. It’s both edible and unclean, both pleasure and waste. That doubleness fascinates me. The surface glistens with desire and disgust at once, echoing how the body can be seductive even at its most abject.

     

    Formally, the anatomy resists resolution. Muscles appear in the wrong places; limbs merge; hands connect to legs; the feet recall crab claws. The body queers itself from within — not through gesture or identity, but through structure. It’s muscular yet soft, humanoid yet creaturely. I wanted to create a form that refused to settle, that stayed between categories. The title Figure in Between reflects that state: between male and female, human and nonhuman, alive and inert. For me, the “in between” isn’t a passage from one state to another, but a place to inhabit — a dwelling space for uncertainty.

     

    Even the bed and pillow share this condition. They’re made from the same vinyl, the same colour and texture. The body and what supports it are indistinguishable — rest and embodiment collapse into one. I like that confusion: the idea that the body is not lying on something, but is something. Environment and organism merge into a single material skin.

     

    This merging speaks to how I think about the posthuman body — as a distributed, entangled being rather than an isolated human form. The sculpture’s synthetic flesh doesn’t mimic life; it participates in it. I’m not nostalgic for the “natural” body. I’m more interested in how humanity keeps blending with technology, chemistry, and fabrication — how our boundaries dissolve into what we make. The figure’s breathless state might not signify death but adaptation: a quieter, internal kind of vitality, operating beyond respiration.

     

    In that sense, the work relates to the idea of the body as a fluid system — an organism sustained by circulation and exchange. But here, that flow has stalled. The figure remembers movement but can no longer participate in it. It’s a closed ecology, a hydro-system that has solidified. The vinyl surface becomes both skin and dam, containing what once moved freely. I think the empathy we feel for it comes from sensing that pressure — the longing for contact that cannot occur.

  • The “in between” is not a transitional state but a dwelling place — a site of suspension where form and identity remain unresolved.

    Despite its stillness, I sometimes imagine it reanimating. Its airless body seems ready to inhale again, as if life could be restored through inflation. The idea of “pumping air back in” fascinates me — a gesture that recalls both CPR and industrial production. It’s a fantasy of resurrection that blurs technology and desire: the urge to breathe life into the artificial, to make the object pulse again. Perhaps this is where the work becomes most contemporary — in its quiet alignment with a world where vitality circulates through synthetic means, from digital avatars to simulated bodies.

     

    Ultimately, Figure in Between holds a fragile balance between empathy and estrangement. It invites care for a body that cannot respond, breath that cannot escape, touch that cannot be felt. Its queered anatomy, unsavoury sheen, and sealed stillness all speak to what it means to exist between forms — between flesh and surface, human and object, life and residue. I see it as a meditation on posthuman tenderness: the recognition that even in artificial flesh, something of the human persists — not as essence, but as longing.