What Fabric Does When You Stop Telling It What to Do
- Sofia Mantoni
- Jun 5
- 4 min read
The first layer is always the most uncertain. By the final one, the form has decided what it wants to be.
This is true of paper, which is where the Reshaping Collection began. It is true of cord and yarn, which are coming. And it is especially true of fabric — the most unpredictable, most alive, and most demanding material the studio has worked with so far.
Luna began as a question. A 64cm polystyrene disc, a length of fabric, and no fixed idea of what the surface should look like. The answer the fabric gave was better than anything that could have been planned.
The material that moves
Paper, once layered and bound, stays where you put it. It accepts direction. It holds a fold, remembers a crease, builds structure incrementally and predictably. Working with paper is a conversation in which the maker speaks most of the time.
Fabric is a different conversation entirely.
Fabric moves. It has grain and weight and bias — directional properties that determine how it falls, how it gathers, how it responds to being pushed or pulled or draped over a form. You can impose a direction on fabric, but you cannot fully control what it does within that direction. The folds it creates are its own. The tension between a gathered area and a flat one is negotiated between the material and the hand, not dictated by either alone.
This is what makes fabric difficult. It is also what makes it irreplaceable.
How Luna was made
The starting point was the disc — a 64cm polystyrene form, lightweight and structurally neutral, chosen because it would hold whatever was placed over it without imposing its own character on the result.
The fabric came from the studio's existing inventory — lengths brought from the United States to Canada, from Canada to Finland, from Finland to Palamós. Fabric that had already been something, or been intended for something, and had arrived in the studio still waiting for its final form.
The draping process was not sketched in advance. The fabric was placed over the disc and moved — gathered in some areas, stretched in others, pushed into vertical channels that ran from the top of the form toward the base. Each adjustment changed the relationship between the draped area and the flat area beside it. Each fold created a shadow line that would eventually become a permanent feature of the finished surface.
When the arrangement was right — not perfect, not resolved, but right — it was fixed in place and sealed with plaster. The plaster does not disguise the fabric. It preserves it. Every fold, every tension line, every place where the material gathered more thickly than expected is recorded in the plaster surface and will remain there permanently.
What was flexible became fixed. What was temporary became permanent. The fabric stopped moving and became architecture.
The plaster surface
Plaster changes what fabric is without changing what it looks like.
Before plastering, Luna's surface is textile — soft, light-responsive in the way fabric is, tactile in a way that invites touch. After plastering and finishing in satin white, it is something else entirely. The folds that were fabric folds are now relief — sculptural channels that cast shadows at certain angles and disappear at others. The surface reads as stone, or cast concrete, or the kind of ancient wall that has been shaped by something other than a tool.
Up close, the fabric origin is still legible. The weave occasionally ghosts through the plaster in areas where the layers were thinner. The irregularity of the gathering is too organic to have been carved — it could only have been draped. But from across a room, the material history is invisible. What you see is a surface that has the quality of something formed by time rather than made by hand.
Both readings are true. That is the point.
The LED question
Luna is designed to be mounted with a warm LED strip behind it — the light source concealed by the backing panel, the glow emerging as a continuous halo around the form.
This was not an afterthought. The plaster surface was developed with backlighting in mind — the relief of the folds is deeper than it needed to be for daytime viewing, calibrated to cast the right shadows when the ambient light is low and the LED is the primary source. In daylight, Luna is a wall relief. In the evening, with the halo lit, it is something closer to a moon.
The transformation is the same principle as Écorce — an object with a daytime face and an evening one. Public and private. What the room sees and what you see when you are paying attention.
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What fabric taught us
The Reshaping Collection is built on a constraint: nothing is bought for the purpose of making something else. Every material arrives with a history, and the studio's job is to find its next form.
Fabric is the most challenging material to work within this constraint because it resists resolution. It wants to keep moving. Fixing it — committing to an arrangement, sealing it in plaster, making it permanent — requires a decision about when something that is still becoming has become enough.
Luna required that decision at a specific moment. The folds were right. The tension between the draped center and the flatter edges was right. The shadows the gathering created were right. Waiting longer would not have made it better — it would have made it different, and different was not what it needed.
Knowing when to stop is the hardest part of making anything. Fabric makes you learn it faster than any other material.
Luna is a one-of-one wall relief, 64cm diameter, hand-draped fabric set in plaster and finished in matte white. Designed for installation with a warm white LED strip — not included.
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