Fanni Somogyi
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Sep 26
- 4 min read
Fanni Somogyi makes sculptures that connect the human body with everyday structures and materials. She works with gourds, lichen, pipes, and metals, often using heat patinas and electroforming to give her pieces layered surfaces. Her interest comes partly from living with chronic pancreatitis, which has made her more aware of systems inside the body and in the environment. In works like the "Molting" series, she looks at how things change through damage and repair, and how those shifts can leave lasting marks.
Q: Your work often draws parallels between gourds, lichen, and pipes. What makes these forms so magnetic for you?
A: Lichens captivate me because they embody interdependence. They are fungi and algae intertwined, quietly transforming rock and wood into soil. I think of them as soft infrastructures: delicate yet vital systems that sustain life. Their ruffled shapes and luminous greens and yellows are alluring, but what stays with me most is how they model resilience and transformation. Gourds, by contrast, serve as bodily surrogates. Their bulbous, irregular forms echo scars and growth, and through electroforming they shed their "gourd-ness" to become vessels, shells, and cocoons defined by texture and surface. Pipes enter my work for their formal beauty and because they, too, act as hidden circulatory systems. Together, these forms create a language of bodies and infrastructures: structures that sustain, contain, and sometimes fail us.
Q: Living with chronic pancreatitis has made you think about interdependence inside the body. How does that awareness carry into your sculptures?
A: Living with chronic pancreatitis has made me acutely aware of how much we rely on the body’s hidden systems. We rarely notice organs, or infrastructures, until they falter, but a leak or pain, whether in plumbing or the body, instantly exposes that dependence. In my sculpture, I echo this fragility by building forms that resemble pipes and channels, often hinting at points of rupture. The biomorphic and industrial converge in these works, mirroring how bodies, like machines, require constant care and maintenance.
Q: Heat patinas in your metalwork echo bruises and fevers. What keeps you returning to the body as a visual language?
A: I return to the body partly for autobiographical reasons, working through pain is a therapeutic process for me. But I also want the sculptures to move beyond autobiography, to speak of interdependence, transformation, and fluidity. The body, like a system of pipes or an ecosystem, is both fragile and resilient. I’m fascinated by drawing parallels between bodies and landscapes: how our bodies become terrain for other organisms, and how landscapes, in turn, bear the marks of growth and rupture. At the core of my practice is an ongoing inquiry into how bodies, infrastructure, and ecologies overlap.
Q: Electroforming transforms decay into growth. Do you see that cycle more as fragile or as resilient?
A: Resilient. The anode dissolves with a certain fragility, but the process ultimately speaks to rebirth and transformation. Like lichen digesting rock into soil, electroforming shows how decay is never just an ending, it’s the point of a new beginning.
Q: The mix of industrial pipes with biomorphic forms creates tension in your pieces. Where do you feel that tension the strongest?
A: For me, the tension lives in the details. In the "Molting" series, a gourd oscillates between vegetal and bodily readings, its jaundiced skin marked with warts and eruptions, its patinas shifting into blues and pinks that recall the capillary action of skin. These surfaces hold the memory of process.
The clash of industrial and biomorphic becomes most vivid at the edges, where strange growths appear. They’re the byproduct of current running too high in the electroforming bath, an imperfection that would be a failure in another setting, but that I embrace as a purposeful glitch. There’s a Frankenstein-like charge to turning the voltage up, seeing the form come to life. The "Molting" vessels themselves hover in that in-between. Repetitive, heart-like, cocoon-like, they appear both alive and spent, carrier bags of possibilities.
Q: A leaky pipe or a stomachache can both signal stress. How do you decide which small disruptions deserve to become sculpture?
A: It starts with being moved by the material itself, there must be an immediate pull. If that spark isn’t there, the work often gets disassembled and built into something else. I sometimes sketch, but more often I need to test ideas three-dimensionally, letting the process reveal whether a disruption carries enough charge to become a sculpture. The disruptions I observe don’t translate one-to-one into form, but instead serve as a spark, a basis for inspiration rather than direct representation.
At the heart of my practice is an attention to what usually goes unseen, the hidden systems, ruptures, and repairs that shape how we live. Whether through gourds, pipes, or patinated metal, I’m always circling back to resilience: how bodies, infrastructures, and ecologies hold us, and transform despite it all.
