Mia Bøgedal

The MA thesis project Nonhuman-Becoming explores what happens when sculptural bodily forms are brought into relation with dress and the living body, each shaping one another and giving rise to a silhouette formed through their entanglement. As the sculpture shifts from surrounding space to living body, it is no longer encountered as an independent object; its meaning begins to change. The dress, in turn, is no longer read only through cut or silhouette, but through the sculptural form it carries. What first appears as a meeting between body, dress, and sculpture becomes a place where each begins to move beyond its own borders. I think of form as the conversation between what you imagine and what refuses to become. I do not believe we invent form. I think it is already there, beneath the surface, waiting to be found. "I begin with the recognisable body — only to follow it away from itself: a curve that carries the weight, bending as something that never found a straight way to appear, as if growth were not upward at all, but toward what waits beneath the surface, toward what begins in us — when the sun sets." Through draping, leather moulding, and transformations of soft foam mattresses, the material begins to change character. This suspends the work between form and formlessness, leaning towards something not yet known. "In my process, I am not the sole creator; the material itself partly determines its behaviour and metamorphic conditions. I respond to what the material seems to want to do." Across these relations, the work holds tensions of elegance and the grotesque, struggle and calm, appeal and repulsion. At the centre is the introverted solitude of the sculptural object, interrupted by the presence of the dressed living body. In this interruption, a quiet reminder emerges: we are never shaped alone, but continuously formed by what exceeds us — never entirely independent and never only one thing.