Elegant Figures and Faces of Dancers Emerge from Intricately Folded Sheets of Fabric

By Jenny Zhang on August 5, 2015

London artist Benjamin Shine put his incredible fabric-folding skills to the test for his latest “paintings” crafted from sheets of tulle. Currently on display at the Canberra Centre, The Dance features the amazingly realistic faces and elegant frames of dancers constructed from over 2,000 meters of suspended tulle. Shine painstakingly folded, pleated, ironed, and hand-sewed the gauzy material until lifelike features and graceful limbs began to take shape in the clouds of purple, pink, and blue material. Intricate details are revealed through contrast created by backlights shining through the wispy layers of fabric.

“When you pick up a piece of tulle, it's light, it's delicate, it's fragile, it's feminine. The idea is to play off those qualities, to see where they can take the medium. . . It's got to be as effortless as a piece of tulle floating through the air that has just happened to form this image,” Shine says in a video that shows his creation process. “This series of tulle works is trying to capture the energy of the dance. Through the colors combining and converging together, that energy is manifesting momentarily. . . It's this idea that through creativity, we are formed, and then we go on to create things, and dance represents that.”