As an artist trying to understand bamboo, I went to Bali to study the structural languages developed there. Bali is the home of contemporary bamboo and the structures they are creating are both visually mind-blowing and structurally fascinating.

What I found was an artisanal culture unlike any I’d seen. Working with the hands is a way of life in Bali; my course at Bali’s Bamboo U showed me that bamboo forces a kind of intelligence that can only be learned through doing.  By making, testing, noticing where something pushes back, and then changing course, I learned bamboo form cannot be separated from its material behaviour. And Bali gave that process a bamboo lineage.

Another important lesson was how to think in terms of structural capacity. In bamboo land, shape is also strength, not simply a stylistic flourish added afterwards.

That influenced and these days I want the logic of construction to remain legible. A good joint is not just strong. It carries a kind of clarity. You can read the decision in it.

Bali widened my sense of what bamboo practice can be. It is not only about building houses. It includes agriculture, treatment, forestry, restoration, tourism, furniture, temporary structures, public art, festivals, and experimental installations.

It also helped me understand that my own bamboo work belongs to a wider contemporary practice in which making, structure and imagination are inseparable.

Surface transformations aligned with the stages of alchemical and psychological development: black, white, yellow, and red.

Each colour emerges through a specific material operation. The black of nigredo is achieved through burning: soot and candle-scorched surfaces that mark a process of breakdown and dissolution. White and yellow relate to albedo, a stage of clarification and refinement. White appears through lime render which bleaches the surface, while yellow is revealed through cutting into the bamboo itself, exposing its inner tones.

Red introduces heat and intensity – the final stage of the psychological alchemy process.  It appears through burned red and gold fabric and the use of infrared light.

These treatments are not isolated. They are layered, interrupted, merging and recombining. The results are shifting fields of processes.

I am greatly influenced by Henry Moore’s idea of a form having a “power of expression.” I work until I recognise that a structure carries this expressive force.

For Carl Jung, the power in an expression lies in its psychological charge. A form becomes significant when it is symbolic of some personal meaning and therefore resonates. That form might appear in a dream, in an artwork, or even in an outward event such as a synchronicity. The resonance is the clue: it suggests that the form carries meaning, even if that meaning is not yet clear.

But psychological symbols are tentative. They do not submit easily to fixed interpretation, to a simple “this means that.” Their significance may take years to unfold and may never be fully understood. As Jung wrote, a symbol is “an expression of an intuitive idea that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way.” It takes time.

This creates a difficulty for artists who want their work to carry emotional or symbolic force, because there is a temptation to force resolution too early. My way through this is to work thematically, in series. I often only recognise the underlying thread by seeing forms recur across different works. Meaning emerges through repetition and variation.

Jung advised making images “over and over again until satisfactory.” For me, this means approaching the same motif through different forms, structures, and techniques. A single work is rarely enough to convey the full charge of an idea. More often, expression deepens across multiple works, through variations of the same motif. It is in this kind of polyphony that the meaning begins to gather force.