These have got to be some of the more beautiful forms we’ve ever come across — and the strangest part is that nothing here was painted, sculpted, or rendered. Every shape in Swiss artist Fabian Oefner’s Millefiori series is a chemical accident, caught mid-collapse by a camera. Oefner mixes ferrofluid — a magnetic liquid with the viscosity of motor oil, originally developed by NASA engineers in 1963 as a way to move rocket fuel in zero gravity — with pigmented watercolor inks, then places the mixture over a magnetic field. The iron particles in the ferrofluid snap into razor-thin channels, and those channels shove the watercolor into pockets and lobes that, magnified, look uncannily like blooming flowers. Check out the video here to see the creation of these wondrous colors and shapes in real time — the transformation happens in seconds, and it never happens the same way twice.
Millefiori by Fabian Oefner:
The shapes, you see in these image are about the size of a thumbnail. They are created by mixing ferrofluid with water color and putting it into a magnetic field.
Ferrofluid is a magnetic solution with a viscosity similar to motor oil. When put under a magnetic field, the iron particles in the solution start to rearrange, forming the black channels and separating the water colors from the ferrofluid. The result are these peculiar looking structures.
Oefner has said the project began after he saw a video of Japanese artist Sachiko Kodama’s ferrofluid sculptures and couldn’t stop thinking about what else the material might do. That curiosity is the throughline of his whole practice: he’s a scientist as much as a photographer, better known for series like Liquid Jewels, in which he photographs paint balloons at the exact instant they burst, and for a 2013 TEDx talk memorably titled “Psychedelic Science.” On itsnicethat.com, you can find out more about the project.
It’s worth pausing on the name Oefner chose, because it isn’t a throwaway. Millefiori — Italian for “a thousand flowers” — is a term borrowed directly from one of the oldest tricks in glassmaking. Ancient Egyptian and Alexandrian artisans were fusing bundles of colored glass rods as early as the 2nd century BCE; the Romans picked up the technique not long after. A craftsperson heats dozens of thin glass canes of different colors until they fuse into a single rod, stretches that rod thin, lets it cool, then slices it crosswise — each slice revealing a tiny, perfectly repeating floral or geometric pattern, which gets fused onto a piece of hot blown glass. The technique nearly vanished after the fall of Rome and was revived with astonishing skill by Venetian glassmakers on the island of Murano starting in the 15th century, where it remains a signature specialty to this day. Oefner’s ferrofluid experiments have nothing to do with molten glass, obviously — but held up next to a genuine millefiori cane, the visual kinship is uncanny: the same concentric rings of color, the same sense of a flower caught in cross-section, produced this time by magnetism and chemistry instead of centuries of hand-honed craft.
What makes the series such a good fit for us is exactly that tension: a piece of hard physics — magnetic fields, surface tension, immiscible liquids — dressed up as something that looks handmade and ancient. It’s the kind of image that rewards a second, slower look, which is really the whole premise behind our Science coverage: the natural world (and the phenomena we can provoke out of it in a lab) is very often stranger and more beautiful than anything designed on purpose. Browse more work like Oefner’s, spanning photography, sculpture, and everything in between, over in our Art category.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
