IVAN MORISON and HEATHER PEAK

DRAWING DANCERS_ Life drawing broke open @rcalifedrawingsociety . An extraordinary and strangely profound experience leading the drawing of dancers Rebecca Bassett-Graham @bexybg and Marino Zamora González @nanozamora from @studiowaynemcgregor moving through a shifting field of music, speed, touch and relation. From the emotional gravity of Arvo Pärt to the euphoric joy of Robyn, the room kept changing condition. Bodies slowed almost beyond movement, distorted through duration, then suddenly split apart, mirrored one another, circled the room, intertwined, collided, dissolved. For me it felt, genuinely, like life drawing breaking open into something else. I’ve drawn movement before, but usually against stillness — one body anchored while another shifts around it. Here there were two moving bodies generating a constantly changing field of limbs, gestures, tensions and proximities. It became almost impossible to “capture” anything. The drawings had to become responsive rather than descriptive. Time itself entered the page differently. And again the life room became that strange, rare space outside ordinary life — where looking carefully at other bodies, and translating that attention into marks on paper, feels less like observation and more like privilege. A collective state of concentration, vulnerability, bravery and flow. Huge thanks to Rebecca, Mariano and Toby, and to everyone who came and drew with such openness and energy. IVAN_ @rcalifedrawingsociety @bexybg @nanozamora @studiowaynemcgregor @morison_studio #LifeDrawing #DrawingDancers #RCALifeDrawing #WayneMcGregor ContemporaryDrawing QueerBodies SocialSculptu

SOFT MACHINES_
Bodies make a city Brighton is a city that already understands the radical potential of bodies. 
Creating a work that grows directly from the people here felt not just right, but necessary. This city taught me how to be an artist and how to love. Soft Machines is a kind of return — an invitation to look, and be looked at, and to ask how we hold one another in view and re-humanise public space. The work explores the bodies that make a city, and the plurality of love, intimacy and desire between them. Rooted in a queer, relational approach, the project grows through people, materials and shared labour. Soft Machines is a new artwork commissioned by @brightonfestival — installed along Hove Promenade between sea and city, developed from public life drawing into collaboratively fabricated sculptures, and made with @makingitout_cio and @millimetremakes , with huge thanks and love to everyone who shaped it, with support from @henrymoorefdn_grants . IVAN_ Photographed by the lovely @charles_emerson_work 
#SoftMachines #BrightonFestival #PublicArt

SOFT MACHINES_
Bodies as landscape The work began with a citywide programme of public life-drawing sessions, bringing together hundreds of participants — professional models, first-timers, couples, friends and queer communities. “Soft Machines began with bodies — not as subjects to be drawn, but as landscapes in their own right. The life-drawing sessions were a catalyst: a room full of people negotiating tenderness, tension, humour, shyness, desire, exhaustion. As I watched those bodies, I realised the real material of the project was relation itself.” That energy carries through into the sculptures — not as representation, but as residue. Soft Machines is a new artwork commissioned by @brightonfestival — installed along Hove Promenade between sea and city, developed from public life drawing into collaboratively fabricated sculptures, and made with @makingitout_cio and @millimetremakes , with huge thanks and love to everyone who shaped it, with support from @henrymoorefdn_grants . IVAN_ Photographed by the great @charles_emerson_work 
#SoftMachines #LifeDrawing #QueerArt #PublicArt #Brighton

SOFT MACHINES_ Alongside the life drawing, I spent time walking the Sussex landscape — meeting growers and fabricators, thinking through the relationship between bodies and land. The sculptures are filled with agricultural materials — hay, straw, heather — held within layers of protective sand skins. “I’ve been thinking about bodies as landscape — soft terrains shaped by forces, histories, erosions — and landscapes as bodies that hold memory and time. Working with ephemeral, organic materials links the sculptures directly to the ground beneath us: they are temporal, permeable, vulnerable to weather, just as we are.” The work holds that tension — between softness and structure, exposure and protection. Soft Machines is a new artwork commissioned by @brightonfestival — installed along Hove Promenade between sea and city, developed from public life drawing into collaboratively fabricated sculptures, and made with @makingitout_cio and @millimetremakes , with huge thanks and love to everyone who shaped it, with support from @henrymoorefdn_grants . IVAN_ Photographed by the great @charles_emerson_work 
#SoftMachines #PublicArt #LandArt #Brighton #ArtAndEcology

SOFT MACHINES_
The making Hear more about the thinking behind the work, alongside glimpses of the process of building these forms. Soft Machines began with open life drawing sessions across the city, before moving into collaborative fabrication with @millimetremakes and @makingitout_cio — a Brighton-based organisation supporting people after prison, homelessness and addiction. Together we tested frameworks, stacked straw and hay, and worked through how these large, soft bodies could hold themselves in space. “Working with Making It Out brings another layer of care and transformation to the work. These are new forms made by people who are also re-forming themselves.” Soft Machines is a new artwork commissioned by @brightonfestival — installed along Hove Promenade between sea and city, developed from public life drawing into collaboratively fabricated sculptures, and made with @makingitout_cio and @millimetremakes , with huge thanks and love to everyone who shaped it, with support from @henrymoorefdn_grants . IVAN_ Photo @charles_emerson_work Video courtesy of @brightonfestival 
#SoftMachines #BehindTheScenes #PublicArt #SocialSculpture #Brighton

THE FIELD OF DREAMS_ A new artwork in Blackpool — a programme of planting, making and gathering that explores how land is used, and who has access, agency and authorship within it. This month, the seeds go into the ground. A field in Mereside will be planted with a mixed crop — cereals, legumes, wildflowers — grown not only for biodiversity and soil repair, but for what they might become. The field is both landscape and material. 
Something to move through, to look at, to gather from. Over the coming year we’ll work with @leftcoastuk and local residents as it grows, shifts, and is gradually brought into use — observed, lived with, cut, dried, handled, remade. What is produced will form the basis of a larger work.
Something shaped from the field itself.
Formed through ritual and time. There will be moments of gathering.
Of transformation.
Of heat. IVAN_ Images: are a mix of medium format research images of the site, along with artists visualisations of the planted then harvested field 
@leftcoastuk 
#FieldOfDreams #Blackpool #PublicArt #Ecology #SocialPractice

FUTURE FOLK_ A new artwork in Blackpool — a programme of planting, making and gathering that explores how land is used, and who has access, agency and authorship within it. Blackpool sits on reclaimed land — marsh, peat, water pushed back and held in place. Spaces left over, lives lived in the gaps between systems. Over the coming year we’ll be working in Mereside on a new project, developed with @leftcoastuk — an organisation deeply embedded in the town, working long-term with the communities who live there. The site is an old recreation ground at the centre of a housing estate — football pitches, a bowling green, now largely left to grow out. 
A place used informally, quietly, without instruction. We’ve been spending time there — walking, talking, listening. Tracing how people move through it, how it’s held, how it’s avoided, how it might shift. The work begins from that position. Not as something imposed, but something that emerges through use, care, and collective attention. IVAN_ Images: are a mix of medium format research images of the wider site, along with visualisations of the planted then harvested field
 @leftcoastuk 
#FutureFolk #Blackpool #PublicArt #SocialSculpture

SOFT MACHINES_BODIES ARE MESSY Sculpture rarely admits this. With this work I want to push sculpture closer to lived bodies — vulnerable and sometimes contradictory. Medium format photos of some of our amazing models: Heather and Emmanuel, Posey and Piotr, Michael and the wonderful Jade @the_hylton . Drawings by my Soft Machines life drawing partner @ju.rowfarr and myself. Beginning with life drawing and moving into communal fabrication, the work holds onto the negotiations of touch, trust and working together that shape any shared space. What emerges sits somewhere between sculpture and ritual — forms that ask how we occupy public space, and how we occupy it with each other. Soft Machines is a new artwork commissioned by @brightonfestival — installed along Hove Promenade between sea and city, developed from public life drawing into collaboratively fabricated sculptures, and made with @makingitout_cio and @millimetremakes , with support from @henrymoorefdn_grants . IVAN_ 
#SoftMachines #BrightonFestival #PublicArt #ContemporarySculpture #mediumformat

SOFT MACHINES_PORTRAIT OF IVAN AND SANDY Images: portrait of Ivan and Sandy, along with other outrageously celebratory drawings by @alejezart , and an image of our amazing models for one session vii @soil_gushing , Leni, Claudia BODIES ARE LANDSCAPES_that realisation changed the work “Soft Machines began with bodies — not as subjects to be drawn, but as landscapes in their own right. The life-drawing sessions, developed and run with @ju.rowfarr at @brighton_dome , became a catalyst: a room full of people negotiating tenderness, tension, humour, shyness, desire and exhaustion. Watching those bodies, I realised the real material of the project was relation itself.” Soft Machines is a new artwork commissioned by @brightonfestival — installed along Hove Promenade between sea and city, developed from public life drawing into collaboratively fabricated sculptures, and made with @makingitout_cio and @millimetremakes , with support from @henrymoorefdn_grants . IVAN_ 
#SoftMachines #BrightonFestival #PublicArt #LifeDrawing

SOFT MACHINES_LOOKING WAS PERMITTED That was the beginning Soft Machines began with a citywide programme of public life-drawing sessions created and run with my wonderful friend and sometime collaborator @ju.rowfarr at @brighton_dome . Hundreds of participants — professional models, couples, queer communities, friends, first-timers — entered the same space where looking was allowed, and where the experience of being seen became the real material of the project. These sessions were never only about producing drawings, though thousands were made. They were about building a shared space of attention, trust and openness from which the sculptures could grow. From that collective ground, the work moved into fabrication. Soft Machines is a new artwork commissioned by @brightonfestival — installed along Hove Promenade between sea and city, developed from public life drawing into collaboratively fabricated sculptures, and made with @makingitout_cio and @millimetremakes , with support from @henrymoorefdn_grants . Images of our amazing models for that session @siancarouselmodel and @nikkilifemodel . IVAN_ 
#SoftMachines #BrightonFestival #PublicArt #ContemporarySculpture

SPACE_ What is sculptural space?

Not just form in a gallery. Not just the built pavilion or the open site. It’s also what happens around things — the field of action they create. The relationships they stir up. The way they make us move, or wait, or wonder.

Sometimes it’s material. Sometimes it’s social. Sometimes it’s a strange quiet held between two people in a room.

I think about sculptural space as something fluid. Not fixed. It doesn’t need to work in the way architecture does. It doesn’t have to be efficient or polite. Sometimes a bit of friction, or misfit, or discomfort brings us closer to something real.

It’s not about functionality. It’s about connection — subtle, emotional, physical, and often unexpected. IVAN_

CIVIC FOLKLORE_NOBODY LIVES BY THE GRID_ This project grew through collaboration with local primary and senior schools, asking what it means to live with public art over time — not just to encounter it, but to let it enter daily life: on the way to work, walking the dog, after school, at dusk. From the children came a gift: a whole ecology of invented beings — proposed as public monuments, carried into the park through parade, story, and ceremony. Their myth-making reframed the commission as something closer to civic folklore: a place where sculpture can hold humour, tenderness, spookiness, companionship… From this permission a family of presences emerged: part guardian, part friend, part stranger. Here wildflower hay, ice cream cones, and sticks are cast into bronze. The ephemeral is given weight.
 _IVAN Images show one of five new bronzes for a new Milton Keynes public commission, Nobody Lives By the Grid — photographed by @charles_emerson_work at the completion of fabrication @castlefineartsfoundry and awaiting installation @culturemiltonkeynes spring ’26 #NobodyLivesByTheGrid #MiltonKeynes #publicart #sculpture