In Ninon Hivert’s multimedia work, an object’s afterlife is an unfolding story—discarded items retaining the memory of a body, its gestures, and its relationship to its environment. She works like an archaeologist, observing with patient attention before translating a found object anew, capturing the textures of contemporary urban life in the process.

Hivert’s study of the forgotten object began by documenting in photographs, then later in clay sculpture, the uncertain gestures of cast-off clothing. In recent work, she has expanded focus to a more general cast of quotidian items. Isolating artifacts at moments of abandon, she clarifies the contour of a presence left behind.

If the present is built on a ceaseless changing from future into past, Hivert’s work captures the strength of this elusive state. Like grain into spirit, her work is a process of distillation. The qualities of an object change slightly each time they are recaptured in a new medium, ultimately extracting something eternal from an unsuspecting in-between moment.

Hivert’s latest exhibition, Ce Qui Est, Ce Qui Sera, Ce Qui Fut. (“That Which Is, That Which Will Be, That Which Has Been.”) at Chapelle XIV in Paris, brings the ongoing themes of her oeuvre to new materials and motifs.

Stacks of flattened cardboard and bags of clothing are compressed into ceramic cubes, their bulging surfaces recording the tension of containment. Glass bubble-wrap sculptures from Hivert’s Demi-Jour series line shelves—fragile objects posing as protective shells for absent contents. A bronze cast of work gloves rests nearby, monumentalizing gestures of past labor. In the background, torn collages evoke the weathered palimpsests of wheatpaste advertisements caught between removal and renewal.

Working in bronze and pâte de verre—a glass molding technique made from fused glass powder—alongside clay, photography, and collage, Hivert treats the dialogue between material and environment with precision. These recent projects are as conceptually rigorous as they are visually striking. Hivert explains:

With glass, after modeling the bubble wrap in clay, a molding process was added, introducing new gestures, new steps, and successive states of matter into this translation. The final result of Demi-Jour was, for me, a kind of serendipity: I ended up with a solid but translucent sculpture, where the dark mass inside disappeared when light passed through it, as if I had captured a shadow.

Hivert’s observations evoke both tenderness and critique. While her work embraces the poetics of transition, it also implicates the viewer in cycles of consumption. What happens when an object slips from use into waste? When does a functional item cease to be visible, and what remains in that unseen interval?

Articulating this fragile “in-between,” Hivert illustrates the transitional state’s autonomy. The result is a body of work that neither mourns nor admires what has been discarded. Hivert allows materials to persist in ambiguity, occupying time differently. In their quiet stubbornness, these forms evoke both what has been and what will be: temporalities bound together by the ever-renewing gestures of the present.

Ce Qui Est, Ce Qui Sera, Ce Qui Fut. runs from October 10 to December 20 at Chapelle XIV in Paris. Find more from Hivert on her website or on Instagram.

Georgia E. Norton de Matos is a guest contributor for Colossal, reporting from Paris.

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Where technology, time, the cosmos, and perception meet, you’ll find the work of Japanese artist Mariko Mori. The artist has long been interested in the relationship between the individual and the universe—existence itself—which she explores through a range of mediums and immersive experiences. She also draws from the Buddhist philosophy of interconnectedness, which centers around the idea that no living being, object, or event exists in isolation. Everything is linked.

A recent series of dreamy tondos and luminescent acrylic sculptures make up the artist’s current solo exhibition, Radiance, at Sean Kelly. Comprising abstract, symmetrical, metaphysical forms in bright pastel hues, Mori’s circular Unity compositions emphasize beauty, interdependence, and transcendence.

This body of work delves into Japan’s ancient cultures, especially prehistoric and early historic eras. Mori extensively researched a number of ancient periods during which artistic, philosophical, and social advances took place, like the Jomon era (14,000 to 300 B.C.E.) and Yayoi period (300 B.C.E. to 300 C.E.). She also delved into relatively more recent eras, like the Kofun (250 to 538 C.E.) and Asuka (538 to 710 C.E.) periods.

“Informed by site visits to sacred geological formations across the Japanese archipelago, including the storied rocks of Okinoshima Island and the shrines of Izumo and Awaji, Mori focuses on these ancestral sites through a contemporary lens,” the gallery says. On Okinoshima, Mori observed sacred rocks known as iwakura, which are believed to contain kami—deities or spirits.

Mori’s Stone series, like “Love II,” re-envision iwakura within the context of the gallery. Made of solid, translucent acrylic that reflects and diffracts light in an almost prismatic effect, visitors are invited into a contemplative experience. “Their dichroic surfaces shift with ambient light and the viewer’s movement, reimagining invisible energies that recall the stones’ original function as portals to the sacred,” says a statement.

Radiance continues through December 20 in New York. Find more on Mori’s website and Instagram.

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In the Malabar region of Kerala, India, an ancient Hindu ritual known as Theyyam exists in a continuum of ceremonial customs that date back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The practice carries on today through elaborate costumes and dances during which a performer wears sacred garments and invites a deity to enter their body as a way to seek blessings. Theyyam season, which typically runs from October to May, sees hundreds of performances around the region, with many concentrated in November and December.

“Theyyam is a reminder that the divine exists within and around us,” says artist Navneet Jayakumar, whose lens-based practice centers around explorations of ethnography and the surreal. “In an age of disconnection, its wisdom has the power to ground us and heal a fragmented world.”

Now based in London, Jayakumar grew up in Malabar, and Theyyam was a memorable part of his childhood. For the first time in 12 years, he returned to Kerala during the ceremonial season and was struck by its intensity and time-honored connection to the region’s cultural heritage. “Witnessing the ritual reignited my curiosity about the broader spiritual and historical context of my culture, the role Theyyam once played in it, and the ways in which colonial narratives had distorted my perception of both,” he says in a statement.

Jayakumar’s series Beyond the Colonial Gaze documents the ancient custom through an ethnographic lens, aiming to highlight an event that’s little understood outside of the region, primarily due to its oral traditions, which make it challenging to research. “With a lack of traceable records exacerbated further by centuries of colonial intervention, I discovered there was very little information available about the ritual’s broader spiritual context,” he says.

Through the innately visual medium of photography, Jayakumar set out to record Theyyam to counteract its lack of recognition—especially as an Indigenous tradition that was seen by European colonizers as “uncivilized” or “primitive.” His energetic, glowing images portray meticulously designed costumes and face-painted performers.

Exhibited in different parts of Europe, Jayakumar’s images represent what he describes as “a symbolic victory of a culture that was destroyed and shunned as barbaric but lives on through me and many, many people back home.” Find more on Jayakumar’s website and Instagram.

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Delicate geometries and organic forms combine in the elegant works of Natalie Ciccoricco. Often working with found materials, the California-based artist threads multicolored string through handmade paper. In her ongoing Nesting series, fiber envelops small twigs that gently interrupt the otherwise meticulous shapes—redolent of the way that trees themselves have the ability to grow around fences and other obstacles in their way.

Ciccoricco has also recently been working on a series called Wrapped, a poignant exploration of loss and grief. Small panels collaged with colorful imagery are then wrapped tightly with bands of thin yarn.

The collection emerged as a deeply personal response to the sudden loss of her son, literally encompassing emotions and experiences that art makes it possible to describe. “These are not somber artworks, but rather an expression of radical acceptance and a surrender to both love and grief,” she says in a statement.

The artist has long been interested in the wide variety of ways that paper and fiber interact, from collaging found photographs with yarn details to hand-making paper in bespoke shapes. The sticks used in her latest Nesting works were foraged around her hometown of Budel, The Netherlands, where she spent the summer.

“Between my own personal grief and the state of the world, I feel my art practice has become an important anchor in my life,” Ciccoricco shares. Her practice—and by extension, her pieces—channel a sense of calm, order, and harmony. “It’s both a tether to something beautiful and familiar, as well as a quiet resistance against all the fear, hate, and violence we are witnessing right now.”

Lately, Ciccoricco has been focusing primarily on commissions, including pieces from the Nesting series at a Big Sur, California, hotel called Alila Ventana. Find more on Ciccoricco’s website and Instagram.

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“It took seven days to create the world; it only took one to disrupt its balance,” says the tagline for an award-winning animation by a team of students in France. “Au 8ème Jour,” which translates to “On the 8th Day” in French, uses CG, or computer-generated animation techniques to create a three-dimensional world in a stop-motion style.

A multitude of vibrant animals and landscapes appear sewn from fabric in the film’s otherworldly realm, each tethered to a single piece of yarn that connects it to a kind of central energy force—a vibrant, tightly-wrapped skein in the sky. But when mysteriously dark tendrils of black fiber begin to leech into this idyllic world, families and herds must run for their lives.

What’s causing the change—and what the black threads eventually cause—seems beyond imagining. Yet the fantastical situation is not so distant from something familiar right here at home.

The United Nations now concedes that its Paris Climate Agreement goal—limiting global temperature rise, due to greenhouse gas emissions, to 1.5 degrees Celsius above “pre-industrial” levels—is not possible. The science-backed goal was established in 2015 to limit the harms of rising temperatures around the world. Though set in an imaginary world, “Au 8ème Jour” is a beautiful, stark, and poignant reminder of what’s at stake right here on Earth.

“Au 8ème Jour” was created by a team of 5th-year students at Piktura in Roubaix, France, a school focused on animation, illustration, and video game design. The work of Agathe Sénéchal, Flavie Carin, Elise Debruyne, Alicia Massez, and Théo Duhautois, the film has been selected for more than 250 awards. And it’s won 60, including Best Animated Short at both the Bend Film Festival and Santa Barbara International Film Festival last year.

See more from Piktura on Vimeo, and head to the end of this article to glimpse the meticulous behind-the-scenes digital process.

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“My practice exists in the tension between rest and labor, between the intimacy of touch and the vast systems that shape our world,” says artist Malaika Temba. “Whether I am working on a small weaving or a large-scale installation, I am always asking what materials remember and who gets remembered through them.”

Merging digital and analog processes, Temba creates layered textile pieces in an exploration of migration, labor, gender, global trade, and daily life. Using a Jacquard loom, she renders tender portraits of people and quotidian urban scenes, from friends seated together to deliveries being made to the hustle and bustle of daily life in the city.

Growing up, Temba lived in Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the United States. In moving between countries, the Tanzanian-American artist tells Colossal, “I was always struck by how fabric marks culture, and how pattern, texture, and material can tell you where you are by what people wear, how they use cloth, and what materials are available to them—whether found in nature, brought through trade, or produced by industry.”

In art school, Temba learned to use a Jacquard loom, which enables weavers to create intricate patterns using an automated method. Invented in the early 19th century by Joseph Marie Jacquard, the machines originally used a punch card system. By the 1980s, electronic versions reflected advances in computing, and today, these intricate mechanisms can be programmed to create virtually any design.

“I learned to use a Jacquard loom and became fascinated by its duality: the loom as one of the oldest forms of human-coded technology and the Jacquard as a machine capable of extraordinary innovation,” Temba says. The method itself parallels the artist’s interest in material and systems. Recently, she has been interested specifically in sisal, a cultivated plant and fiber deeply entwined with labor and trade in Tanzania. Sisal is often used to make durable products like rugs, rope, bags, and more.

The artist currently has an installation titled She Weaves White Gold on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art, comprising three pieces set against ornate wallpaper. In this work, Temba employs sisal as both the primary material and the concept, as she portrays individuals and communities “carrying stories of work, migration, and endurance across geographies and through systems of production and exchange.”

After creating the main textile element, Temba often hand-manipulates the fabric by unravelling areas, adding paint, and silkscreening. These layered elements add to a sense that the work is always in a state of flux—simultaneously constructed and undone. “Over time, these pieces have grown larger, more collaged, and richer in texture, capturing multiple moments within a single woven scene,” she says.

Temba’s work honors the lives and labor of especially people in East Africa. “With tense elections in Tanzania and the ongoing war in Sudan, I am thinking a lot about visibility, dignity, and what it means to represent ordinary people at a time when their stories are often reduced to headlines or statistics,” she says. “Creating these works is a way of slowing down that narrative, of insisting that daily life—the gestures of care, the rhythm of work, and the persistence of women—has value and deserves to be seen.”

She Weaves White Gold remains on view through autumn 2026 in Raleigh. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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When viewed through early telescopes, some nebula appeared round, so astronomers in the 18th and 19th centuries likened them to planets. These so-called planetary nebulae, having actually nothing to do with planets, are formed when a star—of a type similar to the Sun—emits huge amounts of ionized gases as it reaches the end of its life.

In late October, the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) captured this dramatic and beautiful phase occurring in what’s known as the Red Spider Nebula, or NGC 6537.

“After ballooning into cool red giants, these stars shed their outer layers and cast them into space, exposing their white-hot cores,” scientists say. Ultraviolet light from the star then causes the material to glow as it’s cast off into space. “The planetary nebula phase of a star’s life is as fleeting as it is beautiful, lasting only a few tens of thousands of years.”

Webb’s newest image of the Red Spider Nebula, named for its wide lobes that form the “legs” of its namesake, shows hot dust likely orbiting the central star. “Though only a single star is visible in the Red Spider’s heart, a hidden companion star may lurk there as well,” a statement says. “A stellar companion could explain the nebula’s shape, including its characteristic narrow waist and wide outflows.”

Learn more on the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope website, where you can explore many more images. (via PetaPixel)

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A quick glimpse of Jacques Monneraud’s vessels give the impression of lighthearted craft time, with cardboard tubes and layered cutouts affixed with pieces of clear tape. Perhaps they’re maquettes for larger pieces or simply playful experiments with an inexpensive material. But look closer, and you’ll discover there’s a lot more to these vessels than they first let on. Namely, they’re actually ceramic.

Monneraud’s ongoing CARTON series explores the relationship between material and perception. He blends three types of clay, then uses a potter’s wheel to throw the core shapes. When the form has dried to a leather-hard consistency, he trims where needed and refines the contours and edges, creating minute details that give the illusion of cut paper.

Achieving the corrugated detail is one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive processes, which Monneraud accomplishes by pressing a handmade wooden tool into the clay to create a series of triangular impressions. When all of the pieces come together, it appears as though a few pieces of cardboard were patched together with adhesive. In fact, each container is totally water-tight, and they certainly won’t wrinkle or warp!

The artist recently conceived of a series of groupings in an ode to the subtle and playful oil paintings of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). The Italian artist is known for his muted still lifes of ceramics in which perspective, light, and shadow create nuanced compositions. He paid particular attention to the relationship between volume and line, often organizing items so that their tops all aligned or various elements appear to merge into other vessels’ details.

In Monneraud’s current exhibition Life, still., on view in Brussels, Morandi’s compositions provide a jumping-off point for the trompe-l’œil ceramics. Pitchers, vases, jars, and other shapes mimic those Morandi rendered in oil, revisiting the painter’s approach to “cosiddetta realtà,” or “so-called reality.” He was interested in “the notion that meaning lies not in the subject itself, but in the way it is observed,” says a statement for Monneraud’s show.

Life, still. is open on Saturdays through November at 38 Quai du Commerce in Brussels. Find more on Monneraud’s Instagram.

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Flowers, stars, leaves, eyes, and countless patterns transform into billowing garments in Irene Saputra’s vibrant embroideries. The South Jakarta-based artist, who also goes by Nengiren, repeats the playful motif of nona kecil, which means “little woman” in Indonesian.

Saputra’s fashion-forward character might be described as a clotheshorse who dons numerous bold outfits, some of which seem to have personalities of their own. Saputra has often referred to these styles as OOTD’s, or outfits of the day, borrowing from a hashtag historically used by fashion influencers on social media.

The faceless figure’s cropped bob and black boots are the only commonality, as always-symmetrical wide-leg trousers or dresses vary widely. Through color, scale, and repetition, Saputra’s hand-stitched characters also coordinate and complement one another. Some, like the Arak Arakan Sepi series—meaning “quiet procession” in Indonesian—are more abstract and bulbous, while others, like “Terlalu Sibuk Bergaya,” depict more realistic outfits.

Saputra draws on a background in graphic design and illustration, which she applies to her fiber compositions. Through the lens of women’s fashion and personal expression, she channels optimism and her own journey of motherhood. Find more on Instagram.

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The arboreal designs featured in TASCHEN’s new book aren’t your dad’s Home Depot box variety. Uniquely stunning, all 62 structures in Modern Tree Houses respond to the surrounding environment, whether a tiny, winterized pod for escaping the snow or a split-level playground complete with climbing ropes and nests. Built by architects and amateurs alike, each dwelling is varied in material, layout, purpose, and aesthetic, although all thrive because of their proximity to nature’s beauty.

“Modern tree houses are proof that happiness doesn’t have to be built big—just built right,” author Florian Siebeck says, presenting an array of spaces from luxurious escapes to children’s hideouts. Pre-order your copy in the Colossal Shop.

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