For 'Edge: Where the Land Meets the Sea', at Hastings Contemporary from 26 September 2026 to 3 January 2027, France Bourély brings a creature almost invisible to the human eye to human scale.

Bourély is a contemplative biologist, scientific photographer, and artist who has worked with scanning electron microscopy for more than thirty years. Her photography and subsequent publications have been vital to our understanding of the nano space and the beauty of the invisible.

For the first time, she has produced a sculpture — Abyssal Armor — recorded from a single radiolarian in the electron microscope through an intuive manual photogrammetric process. A microscopic ocean organism whose silica skeleton has existed in the seas since the Jurassic period, enlarged over 3,500 times and made visible at human scale.

At only 140 microns across, the radiolarian is too small for the human eye to resolve. Yet its skeleton is an intricate piece of biological engineering. Its precisely arranged pores allow it to feed, regulate buoyancy and manipulate light, helping to conceal it from predators.

To reveal this structure, Bourély prepares the specimen for scanning electron microscopy, progressively dehydrating it, drying it under controlled conditions, mounting it onto a conductive support, and coating it with a microscopic layer of gold.

The specimen is then localised and explored under the electron microscope, from its overall structure to its finest details.

Bourély manually captured hundreds of images, one by one, from different viewpoints to record the individual organism, and performed an intuitive manual photogrammetry process.

Factum Arte then used this record to reproduce the captured structure at a radically different scale. The geometry of the recorded specimen was preserved wherever it had been recorded, with only the minimum intervention required to reconstruct inaccessible areas, remove debris, and remove imaging artefacts. The result is a perfectly symmetrical zooplankton model with its original surface texture.

The result is a transformation of more than 3,500 times in scale: a structure measured in microns becomes a 50-centimetre sculpture. Produced through additive manufacturing in a silica-based sand and resin, the sculpture echoes the material of the original skeleton. Its matte black surface was finished with opalescent blue mica at the artist’s request, to suggest the radiolarian's extraordinary interaction with light.

A complex design that exists far below the scale of human vision becomes an object that can be approached, examined, and experienced in space.

Abyssal Armor is the first work in a new series in which Bourély brings the hidden architectures of microscopic life to human scale.