In the process of recreating this scene it became clear how much it is pieced together from previous experiences and impressions, and I was able to identify several. I continued this practice as I filled in the blanks, but restrained myself from straying to far from the actual memory and the sketch I did after waking up (see below).
Staying true to the dream, I made the walls of the room partially translucent, and all the light is coming from the outside. This, in combination with all the motionblur and depth of field resulted in pretty long rendertimes in Cycles, but the result is quite accurate. Thanks to MakeHuman -awesome tool- I was able to very quickly create the people moving around the scene.
In the darkness of the night, the darkness of a blindfold, and the inner darkness of the mind, someone is witness to transformations of nature and of language. The two meld together in what is essentially one more attempt to remember a dream that was repressed and forgotten millennia ago.
There has been much speculation as to what was the secret at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This work visually explores some of the more recent suppositions such as the the connection between ergot (claviceps purpurea) and the purple cape of Demeter, as well as the murex purple phoinikis worn by officials at Eleusis. While this video work is directly inspired by depictions of Heracles initiation into the Mysteries, the imagery also contain projections by both the artist and others on the subject of the Eleusinan Mysteries.
This work is a part of the exhibition Never Again ◎ which was a collaboration between me and Rickard Ljungdahl Eklund, further documentation can be found here.
The strangeness of some creatures make them difficult to describe, and if you cannot apply language to them in any meaningful way, they become hard to remember. In order to retain the memory one can always interpret it in the form of an image to create a sort of CGI snapshot, which is what I’ve tried to do here. While not a 100% accurate, the resulting image is definitely better than oblivion. And if you’ve ever wondered what a gorilla made up of some 110 000 crystals would look like, this might give you an idea.
Created in Blender and rendered with Cycles, post-production in Blender/Photoshop.
These early concept images were created for Rickard Ljungdahl Eklund and depict parts of a project that he is working on. In the first image is a tall kinetic sculpture that turn freeze-dried locusts into a flour, the second image is of an installation that displays the next logical step in the process, complete with locust bread.