Aesop and Amsterdam-based Body Architect, Lucy McRae, will release their first short film – “Morphē”. The release will coincide with the global relaunch of Aesop’s website.Having recognised a kindred sensibility in McRae’s provocative work, Aesop commissioned her to conceive and direct the short movie “Morphē”. McRae have long involved fabulous speculations about relationships between technology and the human body, and are marked by a captivating, slightly unnerving aesthetic.

For the setting, McRae transformed an old Amsterdam church into a meticulously ordered space that references Aesop’s own laboratory. Here, Scientist employs an assortment of gels, liquids, and weird contraptions to minister arcane beauty treatments to a sleeping Muse.

There are obvious allusions to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty. However, McRae describes her Scientist as inspired chiefly by nineteenth-century scientist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz, and his revolutionary research on human perception: ‘Everything’, wrote Helmholtz, ‘is an event on the skin’. Consequently, the emphasis in Morphē, as in Aesop’s products, is on an adroit and successful marriage of science and nature.‘I wanted to suggest a journey inside a world beyond skin care, one that involves farther realms of perception within the sensory landscape of the human body’

To view Morphē and explore the new Aesop website, please visit www.aesop.com.

Text: Caridee Chung

AESOP
www.aesop.com