Lucy McRae is a body architect. It’s a term that was invented purely out of necessity to satisfy a human resources officer. The fact that she’s the first and only body architect in the world, she says, allows her to do whatever she wants to do – which usually involves bringing together design, science and technology in unpredictable and highly innovative ways. For instance, recently, she has been working on a pill that, when swallowed, creates individually scented body odour. Not long ago, she made a floor lamp, covered in 20,000 sharp hand-dyed sticks, that looks like a deformed and overgrown tarantula. She once conceived a dress that registered the wearer’s emotions, blushing and shivering in sync with the body inside it, and came up with tattoos that switched on and off.


Invited to be a TED Fellow she was told during her interview that she was “completely insane”. To her, that was the ultimate compliment. “I thought ‘Great, you get it, you understand me.’


McRae, born in England, brought up in Melbourne and now working out of her own studio in Amsterdam, dislikes nothing more than to be pigeonholed. “As soon as you’ve got a label, you’re expected to follow some path,” she says. The day she speaks to Australia Unlimited from Canberra Glassworks, where she’s trying to transform a mirror into an artwork for a hotel, she says she feels like a maker; if we’d spoken to her the day before, she admits she would have “felt a little bit like an inventor”.


Not that she necessarily wants to realise all the ideas she comes up with. Rather, most of her projects, including Swallowable Parfum, the tattoos and the blushing dress, are part of her focus of “provoking and creating alternate worlds, suggesting where technology can go and how the body will evolve”. She’s not trying to make a statement with those ideas, either, she says. “I’m just expressing or identifying certain points of where I’m at.” She’s far more interested, she says, in the process than the end result. “I liken how I work to how scientists work – they observe, they learn and then they take the next step.”


McRae's latest work is Chimera, a short film she directed to celebrate the global relaunch of Aesop’s website. McRae transformed an old Amsterdam church into ‘a mad scientist’s lair’ where a god-like scientist employs an assortment of gels, liquids, and weird contraptions to minister arcane beauty treatments to a sleeping muse. You can watch the video here.


To even begin to understand where Lucy McRae is at, it may help to know that her father is a mathematician, that she studied classical ballet from the age of four until she left high school, going to classes four times a week, and, during her teens, competed at state level in 100 metre hurdles. She considered a career as a dancer but thought “it might have an expiry date for me”, so opted for an interior design degree at RMIT instead. “I grew up always making and adapting things, anything from dried flower arrangements to my clothes,” she says. “If I could take something in my bedroom and transform it into something else, that would make me happy.”


After university she moved to London, where she spent a few years working in two small architectural practices, designing such things as a bookshop, a toy store and a children’s playground with undulating benches the kids could skateboard over. It was through moonlighting with fashion designer friend, Di Mainstone, that she discovered the Design Probes team, a research arm of Philips. The team looks 15 to 20 years into the future, as a way of demonstrating that the Dutch electronics company is a leader in innovation, and “to look at how technology can evolve to become more sensitive”, says McRae.


McRae, who does “hardcore kickboxing or crazy yoga” as a way of relaxing, spent four years at Philips, and it was there that she worked on the electronic tattoos, which encapsulate “the idea of ‘maybe’ technology. At the moment technology is either on or off, why can’t it be more maybe – maybe on, maybe off.” During this time, she also created the Skin Probe dress, which made it onto the list of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2007, the year the iPhone won Invention of the Year. “The styles you wear don’t just express your personal taste, they convey a mood too,” reported Time. The idea of the dress centred around emotional sensing, she says. “What does it feel like when you have your first kiss, or what’s happening on a biological level when you brush past a stranger and your hairs stand on end. It’s taking microbiological processes and bringing them to the front in a very artistic way.”


It was at Philips that she met Dutch artist Bart Hess, who became a friend and collaborator. Once a week they’d get together, outside work. “Any energy we hadn’t exerted at Philips would come out on Friday. We’d have no brief, no creative director – it was our time.” Where their Philips work was extremely high tech, the LucyandBart collaborations crystallised those ideas in a very low-tech and yet incredibly confronting way. Some of the things that came about included a live grass suit growing in sawdust and bodies distorted into Incredible Hulk–like shapes through pantihose and balloons or given a new spiky skin of drawing pins – some of which were created to illustrate magazine stories for the likes of US Vogue. Others became part of exhibitions and performances in places like the Pompidou Centre in Paris.


Their ideas would often be triggered by objects found in two-dollar shops. McRae is a fan of turning existing materials into something “grotesque or beautiful or provocative, depending on people’s interpretation. I guess I just push it or keep working on it until it feels to me as if it’s transformed – it’s up to anyone else to decide if that looks good.”


As LucyandBart became more and more in demand, the working partnership “exploded and started to become a job again”, says McRae. “We stopped because it wasn’t our fun sport anymore.” That was two or three years ago, and it was then that she set up her studio in Amsterdam’s Red Light district. Sometimes she has people working with her – often friends or interns – sometimes she works alone. “I don’t like anything to be concrete or permanent – it’s very dependent on what I’m doing.”


Since she set up the studio, she hasn’t stopped coming up with ideas – for instance, the Swallowable Parfum, for which she sourced a scientist who could help her. That’s her modus operandi – she thinks of something, and then goes in search of someone who may be interested in collaborating. In this instance, she found Sheref Mansy, an Assistant Professor of biochemistry at the University of Trento in Italy who, she says, “jumped around like a monkey on Skype” when she told him of her idea. Another collaboration with Swedish pop singer Robyn resulted in McRae art directing her album covers as well as creating a dress made up of 1.2 kilometres of clear plastic tubing through which was pumped liquids of various colours in ever-changing combinations.


Her work on the hotel in Canberra has made the architectural side of her resurface “which is a challenge because I’m having to think about skinning walls as opposed to skinning bodies”. After her stint in Australia, McRae may head to Los Angeles to work on a series of commercials. “If that happens, I’ll be working with choreographers, so it feels as if dance is really coming back in as well”.


Invited to be a TED Fellow – “I almost fell off my chair when I got the email, I’m a huge fan of TED” – she was told during her interview with Tom Rielly, Fellows & Community Director of TED, that she was “completely insane”. To her, that was the ultimate compliment. “I thought ‘Great, you get it, you understand me.’” She spent 10 days in California earlier this year with the 24 other innovators from all over the world selected to be part of the program. McRae gave a talk, explaining what she did. “What I said was I feel like all these ideas exist inside me, and it’s when I have a conversation or talk about some kind of mathematical question or experience something, that idea or experience zooms in and connects with the idea inside my body and then it comes out,” she says. “It’s quite difficult to explain but that’s what it feels like, it’s quite a physical thing.”


Part of being a TED Fellow involves having a mentor for a year.


“I’ve no idea who could mentor me,” she says. “Probably somebody very normal.”