Stitched Skin, Set Aglow: Daisy Collingridge and Isabel Garrett's Bod in Times Square

March 2026, Times Square in the small hours. This intersection carries the highest density of advertising in the world, and it does not lose its brightness even as the date is about to change. Then, at 11:57 p.m., across the more than ninety electronic billboards that fill Broadway from 41st Street to 49th, the advertising goes out all at once. What appears in its place is a pale, flesh-toned body, softly sewn together. Like someone making ready for bed, it undresses, and then dives down inside its own flesh. A mass of hand-sewn cloth glows, for three minutes only, on the hardest and coldest wall of light in the city.

Bod, a film by Daisy Collingridge, who is based in London, and Isabel Garrett, a Welsh filmmaker. In March 2026 it was this work that opened the spring run of the Midnight Moment. Hand-sewn cloth and human flesh — the materials furthest removed from signage of anything one could name — are translated onto more than ninety LED surfaces. This essay is about that translation.

Three Minutes at Midnight — A Time Meant for No One

What makes Bod possible is a programme called the Midnight Moment. Through a partnership between Times Square Arts and the Times Square Advertising Coalition, the electronic billboards of Times Square are synchronised for the three minutes from 11:57 p.m. to midnight, every night. It began in 2012. At the outset only six surfaces took part; now more than ninety screens fall into step. Officially it is described as "the world's largest and longest-running coordinated effort of public digital art," and more than a hundred artists have inherited those three minutes since. This journal has already discussed the structure of the programme itself in Tromarama's Turn On #2 and Tomokazu Matsuyama's Morning Again. There is no need to repeat it here.

One point is worth establishing instead. These three minutes sit in the stretch of the night with the least value as advertising. Not the early evening when foot traffic peaks, not the weekend afternoons when tourists flood the crossing, but the three minutes just before the date changes. Precisely because it is not the most efficient slot advertising has, the advertising operators are able to let it go. And once let go, those three minutes belong to the handful of passers-by still on the street in the small hours.

That Bod was placed in this stretch of night chimes quietly with the content of the work. What the film depicts is the act of making ready for bed — the most private time in the whole of a day. The hour at which a person undresses and is alone with their own body. It coincides with the three minutes at midnight when the city is finally settling into quiet. On the most public wall of advertising there is, the most private of pre-sleep gestures is played back. The choice of that hour is already, in itself, working as part of the work.

A Body Made of Cloth — Reading Bod

At the heart of Bod are the wearable sculptures Daisy Collingridge calls "Squishies." Layer upon layer of hand-dyed jersey, wadding sandwiched between, stitched together one needle at a time into flabby, yielding bodies. The cloth that mimics skin is dyed in subtle gradations, an attempt to capture the delicate, shifting colours of human skin. The work is summarised this way.

"bod" captures a moment. Getting ready for bed, a woman takes a dive inside her own body.

— Sarabande Foundation — bodsource

A woman making ready for bed dives down inside her own body. The tension between exposure and protection, the blurred boundary that separates self from other — the film unfolds the question of how we relate to our own flesh in a register at once soft and uncanny.

What deserves attention here is the character of the materials the work uses. Hand-sewn cloth, wadding, dye. Every one of them is the antithesis of the LED. Against a cold, self-illuminating electronic screen, Collingridge's Squishies are warm, heavy, marked by the hand, carrying a texture that would sink under the touch. When the work is translated onto the screens of Times Square, what is happening there is not simply the display of a video. It is a crossing of materials, in which the most handmade and bodily of things is transferred into the most industrial and inorganic of display devices.

This journal assigns this kei to "GA (画)" — screen, plane, visual expression — because in Bod it is the nature of the screen itself that is put in question. Ordinarily a signage screen effaces its own flatness and tries to become transparent to whatever appears on it. But when a body sewn by hand out of cloth appears, the viewer cannot help being conscious of two materials at once. One is the softness of the cloth. The other is the hard grid of the LED displaying it. The two textures collide, and a residue that cannot be translated is left behind. That residue is exactly what makes this a work about the screen. Above more than ninety light-emitting surfaces, the weight of cloth — which ought not to emit any light at all — paradoxically rises up.

The One Who Sews, the One Who Animates — Two Artists

Bod was born from the meeting of two very different kinds of making.

Daisy Collingridge was born in 1990, on the outskirts of London. She graduated in fashion design from Central Saint Martins in 2014, and after an internship at Louis Vuitton and work in a wedding-dress atelier she shifted her footing by degrees from fashion towards sculpture. What has not changed is that her starting point is cloth. The Squishies came out of pushing the traditional technique of quilting to its limit. The plain principle of sandwiching wadding between layers of fabric stays intact; what results is a voluminous, organic body that can no longer be called a quilt. A sculpture made by hand, and yet one that can also be worn. Work from her student years was worn onstage by Björk, and in 2016 she took the international designer award at World of WearableArt in New Zealand. Her enquiry into cloth and the body has been recognised at the boundary of art and fashion from early on.

Isabel Garrett is a Welsh filmmaker who took an MA in directing (animation) at the National Film and Television School. Working principally in stop motion, she is known for building worlds that are tactile, surreal, and shot through with dark humour. She has made work for clients including Alexander McQueen, Amazon and the BBC, and at the production company BlinkInk she has directed a Coldplay music video as well. An animator's touch — moving physical objects one frame at a time — suits Collingridge's "sculpture you can touch" extraordinarily well. That the cloth body appears to breathe on screen is the work of this director's hands.

What brought the two together was the Sarabande Foundation. This is the foundation established by the fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, and Garrett came out of its residency. Bod was originally a film commissioned by the Sarabande Foundation in collaboration with Xenia. It was later adapted for Times Square and carried out into the midnight city as the March edition of the Midnight Moment, under guest curator Damian Bradfield. A film made for the intimacy of a gallery or a screening changes place for the most exposed advertising surface in the world. Exposure and protection, the subject of the work itself, are inscribed in the route of its exhibition as well.

A Soft Tenkei Within Hard Light — Outlook

Bod stood at the head of the spring 2026 Midnight Moment lineup. After March's Bod came Tomokazu Matsuyama's Morning Again in April, and in May a film by Yael Bartana inherited the same three minutes. Artists change month by month, and the three minutes at midnight are passed on like a relay baton. What the programme sustains is not any particular work but the mechanism of that handover itself.

Here is a subject this journal returns to again and again. Ma — the interval — is the blank deliberately opened up within space or within time. The Midnight Moment bores three minutes of ma each night into the timeline of an intersection filled seamlessly with advertising. And tenkei is the small meaning kindled in the place that has been opened. Just as a small figure brushed into the blank space of an ink-wash painting brings the landscape to life, a body kindled within the scene of an advertising flood gives that night's city a different temperature.

In Bod, the tenkei that was kindled took the form of a soft, hand-sewn body. Above a wall of advertising that goes on emitting light, hard and cold and inorganic, a warm mass of flesh made from wadding and dye and the traces of hand-stitching rises up for three minutes only. The least signage-like thing there is occupies the most signage-like place there is. The sheer size of that gap is what makes those three minutes of the night hard to forget. The light of the city stays as hard as ever. Precisely for that reason, when something soft is kindled there, its softness stands out.

And the only people who can be present for this tenkei are the passers-by still on the street just before the date changes. Not the daytime crowds, not the protagonists of tourism: only those who happen to be there for three minutes in the small hours become witnesses to the moment when the advertising goes out in unison and a flesh-toned body begins to glow. A private, pre-sleep gesture is played back on a public advertising surface, for a few strangers and no one else. The exhibition repeated every night, but no single night's gathering ever assembled the same faces twice. That there were three minutes in Times Square at midnight when hand-sewn skin glowed. That there were people who saw it through. That is how a tenkei stays in the memory of a city.

Sources

1. fig.001Times Square Arts — Bod (official project page)
2. fig.002Artist Daisy Collingridge on March 2026 Midnight Moment "Bod" (Times Square NYC official)
3. [3]Times Square Arts Announces Spring 2026 Midnight Moment Program
4. [4]Times Square Arts — Midnight Moment
5. [5]Screening of "bod" — A Film by Isabel Garrett and Daisy Collingridge (Sarabande Foundation)
6. [6]Daisy Collingridge — official site
7. [7]Isabel Garrett — Sarabande Foundation (artist profile)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Times Square Arts (Times Square Alliance) with the Times Square Advertising Coalition; the March edition was guest curated by Damian Bradfield

LOCATION

New York

MODEL

Ad-slot takeover — A monthly commission in which the advertising coalition cedes three minutes nightly to an artist; Bod was originally commissioned by the Sarabande Foundation in collaboration with Xenia and later adapted for Times Square

CADENCE

Three minutes nightly, 11:57 pm to midnight, with a new artist each month; Bod ran 1–31 March 2026

SPEC

Synchronized across more than ninety electronic billboards on Broadway between 41st and 49th Streets

SINCE

2012

STATUS

Active

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