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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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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“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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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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Throughout her practice, Renée Condo draws on the philosophical tenets of her Mi’gmaq ancestry. The Montreal-based artist works with wooden beads that she sands, paints in bold acrylic, and nests into energetic compositions depicting juicy fruits, raindrops, and brilliant, golden suns.

Condo is interested in mntu, or spirit, and what she refers to as heart knowledge, acts that emerge from empathy and love. Through sculptural pieces that emphasize interconnection and flow, the artist draws on Indigenous creation stories and myths, considering her beadwork a reimagining of various traditions.

Condo often engages the relationship between the component and composition, emphasizing the ways in which a singular piece would appear abstract without a broader context. “The bead as fundamental entity, as infinite potentiality, can appear as divided, as unit, as part,” she says, “but is at once whole and all-encompassing, holding secrets of the world and to the nature of reality.”

This fall, Condo will have work on view at GAVLAK, where she’s represented. You can find more of her practice on Instagram.

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Caledonia Curry’s story of the Sibylant Sisters starts like many others in the fairytale genre, although it takes just a few words to realize that something is off: “Once upon a swampy ol’ dirt road, two sisters, Caelum and Terra, were growing up under the care of a spindly little witch by the name of Katarina.” The narrative continues with the sorcerous mother beginning to unravel, prompting the siblings to rely on the younger Caelum’s magical powers to survive.

“This story is drawn from my own childhood growing up at the end of a dirt road with a mother who was in the midst of a psychotic breakdown, and a lifetime spent teasing out the relationship between creativity, intuition, magic, and madness,” the artist says.

Curry, who’s better known as Swoon (previously), has taken a sort of narrative turn in her practice as of late, translating her interest in family and intergenerational trauma into a sprawling, mythical tale. Seven years in the making, the project is multi-disciplinary and spans sculpture, installation, costume, film, and more. Many of the works can be seen in a four-part read-aloud, and they’ve also spawned an 88-card deck called “The Oracle of the Sibylants,” complete with symbolic imagery distinct to the artist’s practice.

Included are renderings common in divination, including stars and smoking cauldrons, along with more idiosyncratic objects like a glowing Skee Ball machine and flailing garden hose. “Suffused with joy and tenderness amidst the hardship, these cards speak the language of fairytale, because there are some truths that can only be told by witches and unicorns, ogres and toads,” Swoon adds.

“The Oracle of the Sibylants” is currently funding on Kickstarter, which features a video glimpsing some of the live-action and animated films to come. Stay up to date with the entire project—which Swoon envisions as a traveling exhibition, films, novella, and theatrical production—on Instagram.

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Along Britain’s sea coasts, an iconic summertime scene unfolds in outdoor pools known as lidos, where the swimming area is often built right into the beach. Some are more developed with fresh water, chlorinated like indoor pools, while others may be less formal, with the tides pushing saltwater over low walls.

The tradition is closely related to another beloved pastime, “wild swimming,” where enthusiasts take a dip in lakes, rivers, and seashores. It’s often social, further benefiting people’s mental and physical wellbeing, and wild swimming clubs have become increasingly popular. For British artist Tarka Kings, the routine of these timeless recreational attractions lays the groundwork for a series of intimate drawings.

Mornings at the Lido, the artist’s recent solo exhibition at Offer Waterman, highlights Kings’ use of graphite and colored pencil to create quiet, pensive, and relatable compositions. From getting dressed in a changing room to sitting at a cafe along the Serpentine lake in London’s Hyde Park, which features its own lido, King observes everyday yet transitional moments between interior and exterior, action and stillness, and community and solitude.

Since 2008, Kings has worked almost exclusively with graphite and colored pencil. Her pieces pull from experience, with the addition of models and photographic references, as the artist swims almost daily and looks over the River Thames from her studio. “Kings’ relationship with water, and its dynamic within the city of London, is an integral part of her work,” the gallery says.

Follow updates on the artist’s Instagram.

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Jacob Hashimoto’s pieces aren’t easily classified as either two- or three-dimensional. Instead, his mixed-media works play with the boundary between the two, merging traditional craft practices with painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation.

Hashimoto’s pieces range from multilayered wall works to large-scale, site-specific installations made with hundreds—sometimes thousands—of paper-and-bamboo discs inspired by kites. Screen-printed with acrylic, they’re coated in vibrant colors and patterns that almost vibrate when layered with lengths of string, pulled taut between a system of pegs or suspended from the ceiling.

The artist’s eponymous solo exhibition, opening this week at Miles McEnery Gallery, highlights his continued interest in “reframing the brushstroke as a modular unit,” says a statement. “Hashimoto splinters painting’s most fundamental conventions (stroke, mark, surface) into discrete, discernible
forms.”

Each translucent disc is meticulously arranged in a multifaceted composition in which various motifs billow, branch, and blend through several layers. Uniting the individual components into an overall structure, we get the sense that intuition guides the arrangement, yet set parameters—not unlike the edges of a canvas—ultimately determine the placement.

On the same token, the continuity and pixel-like quality of the discs suggest they are planned well in advance. Hashimoto often uses 3D computer modeling software to lay out the overall works, especially large-scale installations, to achieve a high level of precision.

The exhibition opens in New York City on October 30 and continues through December 20. Dive into the archive to read some of Hashimoto’s insights in his Colossal interview, and visit the artist’s website and Instagram for more work and updates.

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