Old, New, Forward

Arrangement: old, new, forward

Materials: steel, wood-fired ceramics

This work is born from a recent turn toward steel, a material whose presence in my practice feels at once inevitable and disruptive. Steel is a medium of immediacy, its strength allows structures to rise almost as quickly as the thought that conceives them. In embracing this capacity for speed and strength, I also seek what lies beyond: the unarticulated qualities, the resistances and surprises that emerge only through making.

Steel offers me more than physicality; it offers a voice. It enters my vocabulary as both form and metaphor. Where ceramics remain burdened by centuries of debate, caught in the uneasy dialogue between art and craft. steel speaks with a clarity untroubled by legacy. Its relatively brief history in the realm of art allows it a kind of innocence, or perhaps indifference: it does not labor to justify itself. It exists as itself, valid without argument.

This exploration unfolds under the framework of @instrumentality.inc.ltd, a name I invoke half-sincerely, half-cynically. To speak of research and institutional structures is to acknowledge the commodification that permeates contemporary art and culture, a system I both enable and endure. My work is complicit, but never wholly. I accept only limited liability for this entanglement.

The sculpture also stages a confrontation with the condition of art’s visibility today. Most three-dimensional work now circulates as image, its presence mediated and flattened into pixels. The digital becomes both survival mechanism and tomb: the sculpture’s life depends on its translation into the screen, even as this translation estranges it from its own material truth. This reality cannot be resisted; it can only be absorbed, critiqued, and folded into the work itself.

In this sense, the arrangement—old, new, forward—is not simply formal but temporal. Steel and ceramics stand as markers of different epochs, different burdens, different freedoms. Together they construct a site where strength and fragility, clarity and convolution, material and image, coexist in uneasy but necessary dialogue.