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.

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.

There’s often a tension between human conception and working with natural materials. The ‘random weave’ technique, in particular (involves no plan, fixings, lashing) invites me to just go where the bamboo wants to go.

In architectural terms, bamboo weaves are often called gridshells. And one of their remarkable features is that the irregularity is often stronger than a more geometric form. You could climb on the bamboo structures I’ve built at festivals.

Weaving bamboo – and having no plan – is playful, it’s like a game. It’s very much a flow state: there is constant decision making, but it emerges as the process unfolds. Working with irregularity is like that.

The species choice is important here – Chinese Moso tends to split easily; often use fresher bamboo is the better choice.

Many Asian bamboo artists use weaves (such as Wang Wen-Chih’s sinuous forms). Light also creates great shadow play, adding another dimension.

My studio is a laboratory for exploring what bamboo can become through structure, sculpture, and experiment. It is a space of creating, testing, and discovery, where whole poles, offcuts and bamboo products are used to investigate the material’s remarkable expressive range.

I am interested not only in bamboo’s structural possibilities, but in its character. It carries its own energy and often seems to suggest directions of its own. My process involves tuning into that inherent tendency, allowing the material to guide form as much as I impose it.

Alongside experimental structures and sculptural studies, I also create shrines and idols from bamboo that function as a kind of studio furniture. These works are a way of paying homage to the material itself — to the spirits, moods, and presences that bamboo seems capable of evoking.

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.