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Entangled Bodies

Between Constructed Forms and Adaptive Growth

Entangled Bodies - Cabinet — © Elena Nechaeva

Entangled Bodies explores how adaptive plant growth can inform design, translating how plants navigate built environments into a method of making. The resulting hybrid forms reflect the relationship between natural growth and constructed environments

Adaptation

Entangled Bodies explores the relationship between adaptive natural growth and human-made structures. The project is inspired by observing how plants adapt to built environments, growing through and around architectural and industrial systems. Rather than existing separately, these two systems continuously influence and reshape one another, giving rise to hybrid bodies that exist between natural and constructed. Instead of representing these interactions literally, the project uses them as a design method. Through making, it investigates how the behaviours of adaptive growth can generate new forms within rigid constructed frameworks.

Material Process

Steel became the central material because it belongs to both systems. It represents industrial construction, yet it also exists within geological and biological systems. Some plants are capable of absorbing and accumulating heavy metals from the soil, allowing steel to be understood as a shared element across both natural and human-made environments. The objects are created by combining rigid steel frameworks with manually bent steel rods. Through bending, wrapping and tension, structural relationships emerge during the making process, allowing each piece to develop through the interaction between control and adaptation rather than following a predetermined form.

Hybrid Objects

The resulting collection currently consists of a shelving system and a lighting object. The project demonstrates an evolving design methodology capable of generating new typologies.

About Elena Nechaeva

Elena Nechaeva is a Russian-born designer and artist based in the Netherlands and a recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven. Working across design, craft and sculpture, her practice is rooted in material experimentation and hands-on making. Her work ranges from open-ended material investigations to projects exploring the relationship between human activity and ecological systems, examining how natural environments respond to different forms of human intervention.

Entangled Bodies - Cabinet, details — © Elena Nechaeva

Entangled Bodies - Lamp — © Elena Nechaeva

Entangled Bodies - Lamp, details — © Elena Nechaeva

Centre area, Kazerne – Design Lab, Paradijslaan 8 , Map No. E14
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