OPERATION
“Operation" is an interactive exhibition where visitors can explore emotional and sensory concepts through playful interaction with art.
Created by artists Zoe McCarthy and Carole Jolly, “Operation” joins painting, sculpture, and animation to create a responsive environment that guests can explore to express and deepen the connection between their feelings and physiology.
The exhibit highlights three figurative sculptures with removable 3D organs. Visitors can place the organs on emotional coping stations around the room, triggering projections that convey internal narratives. An example is placing a heart in a freezer, triggering an animation depicting numbness and disconnection.
Inspired by artist and counselor Carole Jolly’s self-portrait visualizing grief's impact on the body, the project has expanded to include a variety of emotional experiences. Carole and collaborating artist Zoe McCarthy integrate hand-crafted objects, animation, and sensing technology to create an interactive, multisensory installation. The work invites personal reflection while encouraging broader conversations about how we process feelings, using art as a safe, tactile, and visually engaging path to connect with ourselves and others.
Project Credits
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Cloud Oakes
Brian Long
Clementine Giordano
Pat Warwick
Alina Pellicer
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Item description
2D: The Paintings
When Carole Jolly, a painter and counselor, lost five loved ones in quick succession, the last thing she wanted to do was bear her soul through sharing her art with the public, but as a therapist and one who deeply valued the community building mission of the Art Hive, she began a project on grief. Starting with a life-sized tracing of her own body, loose and somewhat distorted because she did the tracing herself, she filled in the tracing with color, painting the colors she was feeling and added many organs, mostly hearts, placed in specific places on the body related to her physical experience of grief. “The idea was that we can feel things in all different parts of our bodies, and when we’re going through very stressful things we might feel our heart in other places. I felt my knees were very vulnerable, my nerves were on fire.” Then she set up a large canvas in her Hive studio where other people could paint their own stories of grief.
Depicting her emotional embodied experiences seemed to have a powerful sense of gravity for Carole, so over time she painted a sequel to Organs of Grief called Organs of Separated Love, and then a third in the series called Organs of Joy.
Organs of Grief
Organs of Separated Love
Organs of Joy
Carole is a lifelong family friend of mine, and I came to visit her while she was working on Organs of Grief. The first thing that came to mind upon seeing the visceral, evocative portrait was a vision of her animated by movement. It seemed so natural to imagine her walk around the gallery walls, expanding upon her story of pain through interpretive actions. Once I shared this vision with Carole, we began conceptualizing how animation could be a narrative tool to expand upon the emotional stories being conveyed by the paintings.
Based on Carole’s grief project with the community, we also wanted to create something that visitors could interact with, leave their mark upon, and use as a way to connect and reflect. We considered other forms of bringing Carole’s portraits to life- not just through animation, but sculpture as well - and allowing visitors to have a tactile experience as a form of engagement, processing, and play. In doing so, the concept of Operation was born, and it became our goal to transform these personal stories into a responsive environment with universal resonance.
3D: The Sculptures
We conceived this installation as a kind of playground space, reimagining art objects as toys within a responsive environment—one that provokes questions about what interactivity can look like, how it might maximize engagement, and how sensory participation can be harnessed for narrative delivery. To this end, we translated three life-size paintings into figurative sculptures with removable organs, bringing forth another iteration of these characters that extends beyond the visual into the tactile.
By inviting kinetic exploration, we aim to engage multiple senses, recognizing touch as essential to play, processing, and integration, and as a powerful way to deepen both personal connection and collective reflection.
The process of translating 2D media into 3D objects was extremely interesting and iterative. Carole has extensive experience in painting, while I have a robust background in 3D modeling and animation, but neither of us had dabbled in sculpture. The figurative sculptures utilized mannequins as a base, but we heavily augmented their bodies through carving, plastering, and painting their forms.
To create the organs, a wide variety of materials were used - for the visceral, raw organs of grief, we utilized materials such as silicone, fabric, and 3d printed TPU to deliver a squishy and squeamish quality. The organs of Separated Love were engorged, inflamed, and heavy, so we embedded sandbags within organs to drive home the conceptual associations of weight. The organs of joy were lighter and more playful, so we utilized fabric and soft sculpture techniques as well as children’s toys and LED lights to inject a spirit of whimsy and playfulness.
4D: The Environment
As we further explored this concept of a responsive environment, a hallmark quality seemed to be giving participants the opportunity to impact the space around them. There are both low-tech and high-tech ways to do this of course - simply moving objects around has the ability to impact the configuration and feel of a space. However, in my experience in game design, I was fascinated by the ability to trigger events - when one player enters a zone, touches an object, or performs an action, a completely separate event can be initiated. This is easy enough to create in exclusively digital space, but the idea of creating a hybridized physical and digital interface was one that fascinated us. The question for us was, however, what actions trigger what events, and how can we use this as a storytelling device, rather than a contrived mechanic purely for the sake of using the tech?
We developed an interesting framework to determine the interactions between action and event. The trigger objects in this case would be the organs, and the placement of them. What does placement signify? Perhaps the places we put our organs can be a tool to symbolize intention and emotional coping. For example, how to we treat our hearts? Do we care for them gently, or do we numb ourselves? Do we stimulate our minds, relax them, antagonize or pick at them? How do our environments impact this?
In order to translate this language into a system of actions and objects, we decided to expand the installation from simply the figures to include a series of “emotional coping stations” that visitors could bring their organs to. These stations represent various actions we might take, such as isolating ourselves, entering into nature, numbing ourselves, using technology, or sitting in our emotions. When visitors bring different organs in different states to these stations, there is room for different stories to be told. Coping mechanism’s aren’t universally black and white or good and bad - it all depends on our intentions.
Now that we had explored the actions, it was time to consider - what events will be triggered? We thought back to our initial vision for the concept, where these portraits were animated and projected on the gallery walls. We realized that through various interpretive actions and animation systems, we could expand upon the links we were making between emotions, our bodies, and our coping strategies. A primary example is taking a grieving heart to an icebox triggering an animation of the character shivering in the cold; another example might be bringing your heart into nature, and feeling a sense of connectedness with the environment around you. Bringing anger into isolation, for example, may result in unfettered frustration and rage, while approaching solitude from a grounded and mindful place might feel more like serenity.
