Soft Machines comprised five monumental sculptures installed along Hove Promenade, between the sea and the city. Their forms deliberately unresolved: corporeal without being figurative, simultaneously awkward, tender, monstrous and protective.

Brighton was the city where Peak and Morison met, trained and began working together. It was also where Morison learned how to be an artist and where his understanding of love, identity and creative life first took shape. Returning with Soft Machines more than two decades later gave the work an autobiographical structure. It was conceived as a love letter to the city, but also as a reconsideration of the person who had left it.

The work began with a citywide programme of public life-drawing sessions, of bodies in connection, developed with Ju Row Farr. Hundreds of people took part, including professional models, couples, friends, queer communities and people drawing or modelling for the first time. Thousands of drawings were produced. The sessions gathered together tenderness, humour, desire, exhaustion and vulnerability. 

The sessions were not preliminary studies, rather they were rehearsals for the emotional architecture of the sculptures: connection, dependence, exposure and bravery. Through this process, Morison’s own body also entered the work.

“I used to keep myself out of the frame. My practice was about systems, ecologies and architectures. But something shifted. Maybe age, maybe circumstance. I realised the work needed me inside it, not as the hero, but as another body negotiating connection, shame, power and tenderness.

“Modelling cracked something open. Being looked at is different from looking. It rearranges you. I wanted the sculptures to carry some trace of that rearrangement.”

Ivan Morison, interview for Soft Machines, 2026

In Soft Machines, the body moved to the centre. The work became more autobiographical and explicitly queer, addressing intimacy, sexuality and personal change.

Alongside this bodily research, Morison walked the Sussex landscape, meeting growers and land workers and investigating the materials produced there. Locally sourced heather, hay, straw and hemp connected the sculptures to the agricultural landscapes surrounding the city. These materials were gathered around structural armatures and held within rough, cocoon-like skins. The work considered bodies as landscapes, soft terrains shaped by pressure and history,  and landscapes as bodies carrying memory and time.

The title refers to William S. Burroughs’ novel The Soft Machine that proposes the body as fallible, improvisational and continually adapting to its surroundings. Softness is not presented as weakness, but as the quality that allows a body to move, break, heal and remake itself.

The work also draws upon a queer understanding of ecology in which boundaries between bodies, materials, landscapes and desires are unstable. The sculptures too are unstable, moving between body and landscape, architecture and organism, monument and ruin, strength and vulnerability.

Fabrication was developed with Millimetre and Making It Out, a Brighton-based organisation working with people after prison, homelessness or addiction through creative design and manufacture. Early material prototypes were constructed collectively, testing how agricultural matter could be stacked, compressed, supported and coated.

This collaborative labour formed a second register of bodily relation within the project. The life room established trust through looking; the workshop established it through action. Holding, lifting, building, testing and solving problems together became part of the sculptures’ internal structure. Collective making was not supplementary to the artwork, but one of the means through which its forms acquired weight and meaning.

Installed on one of the busiest sections of Hove Promenade, the completed sculptures entered the ordinary life of the city. Their ambiguous forms attracted considerable attention and speculation. At the same time, their agricultural materials and uneven skins made their fragility apparent.

Public sculpture is commonly expected to be permanent, defensible and resistant to misuse. Soft Machines proposed another kind of presence: monumental but vulnerable, entering the promenade less as civic furniture than as a group of bodies. Their surfaces invited touch, but asked to be touched as one might touch one another, with attention and restraint. Like human bodies, they could be marked, bruised and broken.

The sculptures challenged assumptions about what may occupy the public realm and how we might behave towards unfamiliar bodies, and towards one another, within it. The care they received became part of the meaning of the work.

“Small children pat them delightedly, dogs sniff them happily, cyclists and rollerskating teens whizz past them, older walkers pause to take a breath and ponder.”

Dorothy Max Prior, “The Great Outdoors?”, Total Theatre, 2026

Soft Machines can be understood as the first sustained articulation of a more personal direction within Morison’s practice. Its autobiographical content is distributed across bodies, materials, encounters and acts of making. Personal change is translated into sculptural form. It asks how a body becomes visible, how it occupies space, how it gives and receives support, and how it might change without abandoning its history.

       

Photographers’ credits       


Installation images_Charles Emerson / David McHugh
Life drawing_Ivan Morison