SolidSilhouette
Your profile, captured and laser-cut in seconds, joins a sculpture made of everyone who came before you.
I — The workConcept
SolidSilhouette invites the audience to take part in a collective sculpture made of silhouettes. Visitors step up to a capture station; their profile is photographed and instantly translated into a laser-cut silhouette. They are handed their own cut-out — and invited to add it to a growing sculpture of the faces that preceded them.
The work is never finished while the festival is open. Its form is the sum of its participants, and its final shape is a census of who stopped, who joined and who walked by.
II — DocumentationPlates
III — The storyMaking & meaning
The silhouette is one of the oldest portrait forms: the shadow traced on a wall, the cut-paper profile sold at fairs. We were drawn to its democracy — anyone can have one, and everyone is instantly recognisable in it.
Combining that tradition with a laser cutter collapses hours of craft into moments, and changes what a portrait is for. You do not keep your silhouette; you give it away, placing your own face beside the faces of strangers.
A year later Strauss Group asked for a Valentine's Day edition, and the sculpture became a collective love letter, built pair by pair.