Hiraeth
Album Cover
Hiraeth is an album about longing for a place that may no longer exist — a home, a memory, a mother figure you can feel but cannot return to. NimaProject led the art direction and visual identity for the Mask of Prospero release, blending sculptural photography, symbolic colour, and kintsugi-inspired detail to portray the fragile relationship between the self and the places that shape us.
- Project
- Hiraeth — Mask of Prospero
- Year
- 2024
- Industry
- Music / Recorded Art
- Service
- Art Direction, Album Cover, Visual Identity, Print Design
The Concept
The band approached us to create an album cover that could hold the emotional weight of their record. We explored duality, resistance, damage and reconstruction, then translated them into a single sculptural figure: half statue, half human; fragile, monumental, and visibly repaired. Every visual decision points back to the same question — what does it mean to long for something you can’t go back to?
The Story
The central figure is the archetype of the Mother — not Mother Earth, not a literal parent, but the internal sense of “home” we return to when everything else collapses. Painted in a concrete-white texture, she becomes both statue and human: fragile, monumental, and visibly repaired with gold.
The gold cracks reference kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with precious metal — a reminder that healing does not erase damage; it illuminates it.
The Visualisation
Two hands — one painted white, one painted black — are wrapped around the figure’s neck and jaw. They belong to the same psyche: the self that protects and the self that destroys; the desire to return home and the impulse to tear it apart. The same duality runs through every frame of the cover, the booklet, and the print collateral.
What this is about
Hiraeth is an emotional landscape — an ache rooted in both love and destruction. Through this artwork we set out to embody the paradox visually: the beauty in breaking, the violence of longing, and the fragile golden repairs that keep us whole. Every element on the cover, in the booklet, and on the vinyl carries that conversation forward.
Photography — NAPAN Studio. Their refined eye for sculptural lighting and atmospheric minimalism shaped the visual language of the project: the textures, shadows, and quiet intensity captured in every frame.
Make-up & Concept Texture Work — Panagiota Ivory. Her mastery in transforming the human form with material, texture, and symbolism became the visual foundation of the narrative — the white concrete skin, the gold kintsugi cracks, the painted hands.
Model — Foteini Tudankova. Her powerful presence and emotional control let the concept breathe; through subtle tension she embodied the fragility, strength, and internal conflict that Hiraeth represents.
Outcome
The artwork shipped as the released identity for Hiraeth. It is the album cover, the label printed on the clear vinyl, the lyric spreads for Amal and Lament through the booklet, and the title mark used across the print collateral — and the same figure carries onto the Mask of Prospero website at maskofprospero.com and into the cover art wherever the record is played.
Because the concept resolved into one figure rather than a set of motifs, the record holds together at every size it is met at: on a shelf in a record store, open on a table as a booklet, or as a thumbnail on a phone.
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