Beyond the image: turning a tear into a physical landscape.

I am developing new ways to translate the microscopic image of a tear into three-dimensional forms — moving from photography into objects, multiples and spatial experiences.

A microscopic tear connected to a personal and emotional moment can be converted into a height map and reconstructed as a digital 3D terrain. That terrain can then be scaled, segmented and fabricated, preserving the visual structure of the original tear while giving it physical depth.

Multiples: sharing one tear as a tangible landscape.

One current study divides a single tear landscape into 88 individual fragments. Each object contains a different part of the same source image and story. The fragments can move into different everyday environments, allowing one tear from one emotional moment to be physically shared across many places.

This direction grows from earlier experiments in which visitors could move through a tear as a VR landscape, followed by a ten-metre physical installation that turned the same principle into a space people could enter.

The current multiple brings that research back to an intimate scale. The aim is to create small tactile objects that can live in an everyday setting, while remaining visibly connected to the larger microscopic terrain from which they were taken. The concept extends the project beyond image-only artworks without suggesting that a crystalline pattern itself can identify an emotion; the meaning stays connected to the real story of the tear.