PELLINFLATUS

Category: Design*

This project explores rawhide as an active, living material through the act of inflation. By introducing air as a formative force, rawhide expands, stretches, and holds tension, producing voluminous forms that exist between softness and structure. Inflation is employed not simply as a technical process, but as an expressive gesture that dissolves the conventional hierarchy between material, surface, and support. Referencing the human body, the inflated forms echo flesh under pressure—bulging, weighted, and resilient. In this context, fullness is reframed as a site of beauty, presence, and vitality rather than excess. The rawhide’s elasticity allows bodily qualities to be translated into spatial form, transforming tension and expansion into a sculptural language. Situated between sculpture and furniture, the work blurs distinctions between the natural and the fabricated, the organic and the industrial, the soft and the rigid. Through inflation, the project proposes an alternative design vocabulary—one that embraces corporeality, instability, and material responsiveness as fundamental aesthetic values.