For three minutes each night before midnight, Times Square, one of the most chaotic, colorful intersections on earth, changes its rhythm. The flashing ads pause. The spectacle softens. And the world’s largest public digital art exhibition, Midnight Moment, takes over the screens.
When British artist Daisy Collingridge saw her work Bod projected across 92 screens in Times Square, the experience felt almost surreal.
“Seeing Bod projected across 92 screens as part of Midnight Moment in Times Square feels completely mad!” Collingridge says. “It is a monumental shift in scale and context.” The transformation is dramatic. A project that began as an intimate exploration of the human body suddenly occupies one of the most visually saturated public spaces in the world. “A work that began as an intimate exploration of the body suddenly inhabits one of the most saturated visual environments in the world,” she explains.
But for Collingridge, the scale of the installation is also part of its power. “It’s exciting that Midnight Moments reaches a diverse audience who maybe don’t usually look at art,” she says. “My hope is that people will pause and maybe tumble into another world for a short while.”
That invitation, to slow down and enter a different kind of space, is central to Bod. The piece explores the strange and deeply personal relationship we have with our own bodies.
“Bod is a reflective look at the most intimate relationship we will ever have—with our bodies,” Collingridge says.
Her sculptural forms, which appear throughout the film, are soft, ambiguous, and slightly uncanny. “We enter a space which is soft, ambiguous and constantly changing,” she explains. “The forms are slightly uncanny—there is undefined flesh and folds and yet there is a familiarity.”
Collingridge is fascinated by that emotional tension between recognition and alienation. “I’m interested in that moment when something feels strangely intimate and slightly alien at the same time,” she says.
Presenting those ideas in Times Square adds another layer of meaning. “Times Square is a riot of color, speed, and hyper-visible,” Collingridge says.
In contrast, her work asks viewers to momentarily turn inward. “I hope that those three minutes will allow people to pause and descend beneath the surface of the body,” she says. “A quiet reminder that underneath the spectacle of the city we are all carrying these soft vulnerable forms. There will be a shared feeling of being embodied.”
The idea that we all share the same fragile physical reality is something Collingridge has been exploring for years.
Looking back, she can see how her upbringing shaped that curiosity. “I come from a family of nurses and scientists,” she explains. “So there was always an underlying respect for the body and an understanding of its complexity and functionality.” At the same time, creativity played an equally important role. “I grew up with a mother who made things,” Collingridge says. “She taught me to sew at a young age.”
That skill unlocked something powerful.
“As a child I made around fifty soft toys,” she recalls. “Sewing unlocked the ability to imagine a form and then physically realize it.”
Today, fabric remains the core material of her sculptural practice. “I still predominantly work with fabric,” she says. “Cloth has a tactile, responsive quality—it folds, stretches and sags.”
Those qualities make it surprisingly perfect for exploring the body. “It reacts to gravity and movement in a way that feels bodily,” Collingridge explains. “It’s also a very intimate material to work with because we are all so familiar with cloth.”
Her fascination with anatomy was also shaped by powerful early artistic experiences. One of them came at the age of twelve. “I saw Body Worlds when I was 12—you can’t really un-see it,” she says. The exhibition sparked a deeper interest in the hidden systems beneath the skin. “You cannot look at living things without considering their death,” Collingridge reflects. “It’s part of the relentless cycle of organic matter.”
She often returns to historical anatomical imagery for inspiration. “I frequently look at the work of Andreas Vesalius,” she says, referring to the Renaissance anatomist whose book De Humani Corporis Fabrica helped transform scientific understanding of the human body.
“What fascinates me most is the beauty and strangeness,” Collingridge explains. “The figures appear reanimated, flayed figures standing or walking through landscapes in various stages of dissection. The engravings themselves are incredibly beautiful, with intricate lines describing the striations of muscle, yet the subject matter is undeniably morbid.”
That tension between beauty and discomfort remains central to her own work. “There’s a strange balance between beauty, horror and even humor,” she says. “The images are unsettling but beautiful.” In Collingridge’s practice, that tension becomes physical. Her sculptural suits blur the line between fine art, performance, and fashion design.
They exist in two states. “When they’re displayed without a body inside, they hold a certain stillness,” she says. “They read more clearly as sculptural objects.” But once someone steps inside them, everything changes. “They breathe, walk, sway and respond,” Collingridge explains. “Their presence becomes relatable.”
That transformation, from object to living form, is one of the most important moments in her work.
“In many ways, the inhabiting completes them,” she says. Movement introduces vulnerability and unpredictability. “The form is no longer static,” Collingridge explains. “It negotiates through space.”
The figures themselves are intentionally universal. “My interests are what unifies us,” she says. “Not just as humans but throughout the biological world.” Patterns repeat everywhere in nature. “There are so many repeating structures that transcend the organic and inorganic worlds,” she explains. “There are countless commonalities, yet we are all unique.”
Creating the sculptures is an intensely physical and time-consuming process. “The process relies heavily on hand stitching,” Collingridge says. Each wearable piece takes months to complete. “Hand sewing is slow and contemplative,” she explains. The sculptures grow organically as she builds them. “They are grown—usually from the head first,” she says. Materials are carefully chosen for softness and movement. “The fabrics are all hand dyed to create soft color palettes,” Collingridge says. “The materials are soft jerseys, floaty waddings and squashy foams.”
Some areas are weighted to influence movement. “There are weighted sections which respond to movement in a certain way,” she explains. Despite the complexity, the process remains intuitive. “The whole process is quite impulsive,” she says. “It feels more like sculpting.”
And each work is entirely unique. “They are one-offs and cannot be remade.” For Bod, collaboration added another layer to the project. Working with director Isabel Garrett helped bring the sculptural world to life on screen. “We already knew we shared a similar visual language,” Collingridge says. “The collaboration felt very natural.” Garrett’s cinematic storytelling expanded the project’s scope. “She creates incredibly beautiful and complex worlds,” Collingridge explains. “Through collaboration we were able to expand into a whole universe.”
That universe now unfolds nightly across Times Square’s towering screens. And for a brief moment, the frantic pace of the city softens. “It’s a beautiful moment,” Collingridge says. During Midnight Moment, the rhythm of Times Square changes. “Midnight Moment offers a collective pause,” she explains. And in that pause, something unexpected happens. “Maybe for those few minutes the hard edges of the city will soften,” Collingridge says. “We look up, look around and look inside.”
For collectors and viewers discovering Daisy Collingridge’s work, whether through her wearable sculptures, drawings, or exhibitions, that sense of intimacy is exactly what makes her art unforgettable. Each stitched fold, swelling form, and surreal body shape invites us to reconsider the most familiar structure we carry with us every day. The human body itself.
