R E L M
Cultivating Form Enchanting Space
R E L M is a collaboration between artist Raphael Lyon and architect Elliot Meier. Their first collection, Vegetative Minerals, draws inspiration from a term used by Isaac Newton in 1670 to describe the capacity of certain metals, under specific conditions, to form organic shapes.
This exploration of the fluid boundary between geology and biology—animal and vegetal, the made and the grown—drives their work and informs an aesthetic rooted in the fundamentally unpredictable, shaped by chaotic forces and arcane craft.
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On a practical level, these particular works have been created through the dissolution and reformation of recycled copper– grown in a liquid bath, atom by atom using controlled electrical fields.
Known as electromechanical deposition (or electroforming,) it is one of the phenomenons investigated by Newton, and has a long, if largely forgotten history in the development of design and architecture elements.
While the technique of electroforming is typically used today by jewelers and hobbyists to set small stones; its origins in the early 19th century were far more industrial and ambitious.
Then referred to as electrotyping or galvanoplasty, the method was employed to craft monumental sculptures and towering architectural elements, including some for The Great Exhibition of 1851 and The Palais Garnier in Paris.
What differentiates this work from traditional electroforming is that we allow the copper surface to grow freely, bounded only by the flow of electrical currents.
In practice this means any edge or protruding part of the work behaves like a lightning rod to draw more current, plating faster and growing quicker, fueling even more growth.
It is this feedback loop between the surface of the work and the electrical field that produces organic formations and makes each piece unique.
The final form is the result of a dynamic interplay between an initial seeded framework and organic growth. In many ways this process mimics the chaotic physics of video feedback and produces equally strange results.
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