Laura Emel Yilmaz: Metra Morpher

Metra Morpher is an immersive, interactive installation by internationally acclaimed animator and visual artist Laura Emel Yilmaz, which invites you to explore the metaphysical wilds of the changing body. Combining hand-drawn animation, experimental game design and spatialised audio composed by Nathan Carter, the exhibition creates a strange and shifting world in which bodies morph, multiply and become other. Human, animal, cosmic and creaturely forms slip in and out of recognition, pulsing with an unruly life of their own.

But you are not simply here to watch. Inside the installation, your body becomes part of the work. Sensors respond to the presence and proximity of your hands, triggering shifts in colour and sound, visual echoes and changes in the rhythm of the animations. The world of Metra Morpher shifts in response to you, making each encounter a unique co-creation between artist, artwork and audience.

This slippery space between self and other is at the heart of Metra Morpher. The work grew from Yilmaz's experiences of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, and the profound strangeness of encountering her own body as simultaneously herself and the site of another life. Cells multiply. Organs shift. A new person emerges, and another is transformed alongside them. The body gets on with its mysterious business while the conscious mind tries to catch up. For Yilmaz, motherhood becomes a starting point for thinking about the instability of identity itself, and the ways we are continually shifting, stretching and being remade.

For Yilmaz, these ideas take on new urgency in an increasingly disembodied digital world that equates intelligence with logic, optimisation and efficiency. Motherhood and animation are both acts of creation which don’t fit so neatly into this equation; they rely on deeply intuitive and gloriously time-consuming ways of knowing whose value has nothing to do with speed. As she puts it: “To be both a good mother and a good animator you have to build a new and strange relationship to time.” Our messy sensory lives, Yilmaz suggests, are not biological limitations to overcome, but forms of intelligence in their own right.

Created as Yilmaz's first major museum installation, Metra Morpher pushes animation beyond the screen, transforming it into a world we can enter, inhabit and affect. Here, the tidy boundaries between mind and body, self and other, human and creature, physical and digital start to come a little unstuck. Yilmaz draws us into the strange, purpled space in between, where logic is only one way of making sense of things, and the body has a mysterious intelligence all its own.