Creating bamboo maquettes as a precursor to larger structures is a traditional process used by Balinese and Vietnamese bamboo carpenters. Following this traditional, I often use maquettes to study the designing and weight dynamics of future pieces.

I also use bamboo maquettes to study how a piece might feel, on its own or combined with other maquettes and bamboo elements. Each has its own feeling and expressiveness and building small models like this allows me to imagine how larger pieces might convey emotional resonance.

It’s often a challenge to scale up, however. Bamboo carpentry responds differently as the bamboo gets larger and heavier; joints that I’ve modelled lack the strength, and I’ve often failed to make things bigger that I’ve envisaged small. Maquettes are useful as a prototype guide, but larger piecies often take direction that are only nasceant in their smaller cousins.

Bamboo is well known for its furniture and building potential. I wanted to explore how this was done, and since bamboo carpentry is quite distinct from its wood equivalents, the only way to do this was to build prototypes of my own.

Each piece was therefore an investigative process: testing how different bamboo species, sizes, and connection techniques behave when brought together.

There are not a huge range of bamboo joinery techniques (one Balinese carpenter told me ‘if you can make a fishmouth joint, you can make anything!’), but neither are they easy to do. Building furniture gave me a way to do joints over and over again, and to make them serviceable, both from structural and aesthetic angles.

One of the great benefits (to my mind) of making bamboo furniture is also that it substantial amounts of offcuts, which then became interesting elements of their own.

A constantly-evolving series of material experiments with bamboo assembly. The work ranges across structures, maquettes, furniture, and sculptural, exploring how bamboo can be shaped and assembled through both traditional and improvised techniques.

The process involves a wide range of operations: suspension, the use of light and shadow, and structural methods such as assembly, insertion, layering, and combining different elements. Surfaces are developed through processes such as oiling and varnishing.

I use both raw bamboo and manufactured bamboo products in these experiments. Alongside whole canes, materials such as sushi rolling mats and bamboo skewers are incorporated into the work, expanding the vocabulary of forms and often enabling more delicate or intricate constructions.