This Artist Makes Incredible Sculptures Out of Fabric

When the work looks like fabric, that drives me mad. It has to look like smoke. My name's Benjamin Shine. I first started playing around with tulle when I was at fashion college. Through this material I find it has a spiritual aesthetic to it. It's kind of got that fluid nature but it's there and it's not there and to me that's really interesting as a concept. I think I was drawn to create this technique for generating portraits because you have to get it right. You can't get a portrait almost right and I liked that challenge of creating something accurate or on a level that was as detailed as painting. 100 hours for something like that and especially when there are eyes involved, eyes 10, 15, 20 hours can easily accumulate on that. So to achieve the detail, it comes down to trial and error and a lot of tweaking. I walk backwards and forwards like a million times. That's why I stay so skinny. I do about 50 miles a day in the studio, just backwards and forwards. And I just kind of let the fabric go where it's got to go. You can force it and you can get great results but something more interesting by letting the fabric sort of just work in harmony with it and then you get the two stories. One is what I've done with it and the other is what it's doing by itself. I come to New York so often and always it's just the energy of this place informs my work so massively. There's a sense that there really is absolutely carte blanche to do whatever and take ideas to their extreme. With Chur, I keep finding new things. It's what I think I've, you know, there can't be anything more to do now. Every day coming to the studio, I don't know what's going to happen. By the time I go to bed, I don't know what will have happened and sometimes I'm amazed. I'll stop talking, that's when you know I'm gone.