Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina — A Living Installation for Artists

This December, step into the extraordinary at The British Engineerium, Hove, where art meets industry in a mesmerising fusion of body and machine.

Deus Ex Machina is a unique life drawing experience, performed by Francesca Cluney, Catherine Benson, Simon Chandler and Helen D'arcy. Through a series of tableaux vivants across two of the museum’s historic engine halls. — The models will embody shifting states between the organic and the mechanical, inviting artists to witness transformation in real time.

Across three drawing stations, the installation unfolds in two parts. Poses are sculptural, silent, and precise — evolving slowly through a narrative of metamorphosis: the human form becoming machine, the soul merging with mechanism, and the machine glimpsing its own divinity. Artists are free to move between stations, capturing each moment as it breathes and changes.

There are no spoken words, no conventional performance — only the hypnotic interplay of body, light, and industrial space. This is a reimagining of the 19th-century tableaux vivant for a contemporary audience — blending Costume drawing, performance art, and the history of engineering into a meditation on creation, control, and the limits of the human body.