Flower Figures Nº04 (Fall – Asleep)

What you are looking at

Seen from above, a woman lies curled on her side, asleep, in a deep bed of red, orange and rust-brown leaves that swirl around her like water. Her skin is white and glossy, like glazed porcelain, with a fine network of crackle lines. Her head rests on her bent arm, her eyes closed, her hair tied up. One hand is drawn to her chest. Her knees are pulled up.

But the body is not whole. In places the white shell has broken away, at the shoulder, the hip, the thigh and shin, and where it is missing there is no flesh beneath, only more leaves, the same reds and browns as the ground. A loose shard of white skin lies beside her foot. She is both lying in the leaves and made of them.

The series

The work belongs to Flower Figures, a series of digital sculptures by the French computer-graphics artist Jean-Michel Bihorel, begun in 2016. Bihorel, who works in Paris as a CG supervisor at the animation studio Mécanique Générale and co-founded the training school Creative Seeds, created the figures with 3D scanning and procedural modeling, building plant forms that can be multiplied and arranged over a body in software such as Houdini and Maya, then rendered as still images. The earliest images in the series used dried hydrangea blossoms; this one uses autumn leaves, and its subtitle, Fall – Asleep, puns on the season and on falling asleep.

Close looking

The composition is a spiral. The leaves are arranged in curving drifts that wrap around the figure, and the body itself, curled in the fetal position, repeats the curve. The light falls from the top right, so the white skin glows against the warm, darker ground. Look at the broken edges of the shell: they are thin and sharp, like eggshell or cracked glaze, and they curl slightly where the leaves press up beneath them. On the shin, the leaves inside the leg are arranged in neat overlapping rows, almost like scales, while those outside are loose and scattered.

Meaning

Bihorel has described the skin in these works as the boundary between the face we present and our inner life. In Nº04 the boundary is wearing away in sleep, and the figure is returning to the ground she lies on. Autumn leaves are an ancient emblem of mortality and of the cycle of seasons; a sleeping woman who becomes leaves can be read as death, as dreaming, or as a gentle merging with nature. The porcelain finish keeps the image cool and beautiful rather than morbid.

Related works

See the cracked torso of Flower Figures Nº02 and Bihorel's Winter Sleep. For older images of sleeping figures, compare Sleeping Beauty by Louis Sussmann-Hellborn, and for nature growing from the body, Kate MacDowell's Solastalgia.