Structure is not only created only through the strength of a material. It can also emerge from how forces are organised within a form.

For example: an eggshell is extremely thin, yet surprisingly strong because its curved shape distributes compressive forces across its surface. The strength comes less from the material itself and more from how those forces are arranged aka it’s shape.

In this way, shape can make a material work against itself, work with a load, or behave in more complex ways. Form becomes an active participant in structure.

This can feel counterintuitive because most of the built environment relies on a limited set of geometries – flat planes, right angles – and on the inherent strength of materials like steel, concrete and plastics. Even natural materials are typically processed into these simplified forms, which reduces our sensitivity to what shape alone can do.

Nature, by contrast, develops structure through form. A spider’s web, for example, achieves strength through tension and geometry rather than thickness.

Bamboo makes this especially clear. It is strong along its fibres, weak across them, and inconsistent from piece to piece. Its joints are never perfect. Because of this, you cannot rely on uniform material strength. You are pushed instead toward designing with shape.

In contemporary bamboo construction, this leads to forms that distribute forces across multiple elements: hyperbolic paraboloids, where straight members create a stiff curved surface; reciprocal frames, where each element supports the next; and bundles or weaves, where strength emerges collectively rather than individually.

If shape carries structure, then meaning can also be embedded in how something stands or holds together – not just in what it represents.

An object’s coherence is not purely visual. There is always a real, physical logic holding it together. That logic may be distributed, partially hidden, or not immediately legible—but it is present, and it can be felt.

 Technique & Process

Bamboo is my primary material, and I use a combination of cuts, splits, breakages, offcuts and connection techniques to create sculptural forms.

I use bamboo carpentry as a means of engaging with ideas of connection, breakdown, tension, strength, shadow, and rupture.

My work follows a process of iteration – creating, assembling, and revising forms.

Style

I use evidence of joinery, breakages, and assembly as part of my final aesthetic. I do this via visible connections, tool marks and using both whole bamboo poles in addition to offcuts. My pieces express a subtle internal structure that is expressed by how the work stands up.

My colour palette is native to various bamboo species, and light and shadow are also important elements.

Philosophical Underpinning

A pervasive underlying assumption of modernism is that any meaning and purpose does not exist, but is instead constructed and projected by the human mind. “But the achievements of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation” (Richard Tarnas).

My work implies there are techniques and processes via which we can find hidden meanings or connections. And that these techniques have an underlying strength, resilience or organising capability. It suggests that there is a hidden structure there – something that is meaningful, if only we can find it.

It implies what that inner structure might be.

My work is concerned with experience in the world. Meaninglessness is part of a way of thinking about things – that what I think determines who I am. This product of modernism (including the online world) and suggests ‘you are outside looking in’. I want to posit an alternative – that there is an inside looking out. 

Engagement with Art/ Historican Canon

My work engages art traditions that explore how things are perceived and their relationship to meaning.

Relevant points of reference include:

• Anselm Kiefer – continues to explore signification systems

• Ebert – points out the point of contemporary art is to

• Joseph Beuys- described objects as tools for transformation — spiritual, psychological, and social.

• Andy Goldsworthy – ‘thank you for showing me what is there’.

• Carl Jung – Carl Jung followed the path of going inside to find previous hidden signification systems. his Red Book is a decade long exploration of interactions with dream analysis and automatic writing..

More broadly, the practice resonates with strands of Process Art, Post-Minimalism, and contemporary ecological art, which emphasise material behaviour and making as investigation. These references are contextual rather than imitative, positioning the work within ongoing conversations about materiality, structure, symbolism, and the role of making in contemporary art.

Following these traditions and artists, my work is not primarily concerned with what it looks like. While aesthetic qualities are important, the practice is driven by investigation into materials, structure, and  psychological suggestion.

The process is the message: making is a way of generating knowledge, experience, and meaning.

Different Series

Metanauts (2022–2023)
My Metanauts series consisted of printed or painted human figures embedded with smashed phones and dismantled hard drives. The works reflected a growing unease with digital culture: the figures seemed broken, hybrid, or wounded by technology. Many were later installed in abandoned urban locations, as if reintroducing a sense of spirit or presence.

Idols (2023–2024)
The Idols series consisted of digital interpretations of traditional African and Mesoamerican masks. I was attempting to find something significant and introduce it to the otherwise weightless space of digital imagery. I later also placed printouts of the Idols on abandoned or derelict walls, continuing my interest in inserting symbolic forms into forgotten environments.

Bamboo Maquettes (2024–2025)
The Bamboo Maquettes marked my transition into working physically with bamboo. In bamboo I sense a hidden power of expression. These small-scale pieces were structural experiments exploring how bamboo elements could be joined, balanced, and made to stand. The works also marked a shift toward thinking architecturally, considering connection, compression, and spatial form. This period allowed me to develop familiarity with the material, tools, and craft processes that would later underpin my bamboo sculptures.

Some of my work has been concerned with the processes of alchemy as routes towards personal change.

Carl Jung recognised that alchemical processes can be understood as material and psychological. A visual blackening might be read symbolically as depression or collapse. But alchemists go further than symbolism: they propose that these processes are not merely representations of inner states, but are the same processes, unfolding across both matter and psyche.

This is what is meant when alchemy is said to “seek spirit in matter.” They actions performed are not just metaphors, but parallel expressions of transformation within the individual.

In this way, Jung saw alchemical theory as he saw myth: not as primitive science or outdated narrative, but as a kind of schematic for psychological experience. Alchemy interlaces tangible, physical processes with the more elusive movements of the unconscious.

This connected to my interest in using non-representational strategies to convey meaning. My work is not about what it symbolises, it is about what is actually there.