Carbon Capture (5-billion years of hell engineering) 2025
aluminum, limewood, ceramic
modular installation
documentation by Cy Yang-Smith at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
My work begins from the conditions of being shaped by systems we cannot opt out of. I am interested in how identity, ideology, and emotional life are formed not through explicit belief, but through infrastructure: economic, industrial, and aesthetic. These structures rarely show themselves directly; instead, they surface through habits of thought, ambient dread, and an inability to imagine alternatives. Sculpture, for me, is a way of giving form to that ambient pressure, not by illustrating it directly, but through the surface, weight, and behavior of materials.
I’m drawn to objects and forms that hold a tension between survival and denial. Containers, vessels, supports, filters, things that imply a function but don’t quite fulfill it. The work sits somewhere between the functional and the fossilized. I often think of these sculptures as expressions of systems that are still running but have already failed. What interests me is not collapse in the cinematic sense, but stagnation: the cultural stasis of a society too invested in its own undoing to change course.
I return to objects shaped by survival and violence: tools, fragments of infrastructure, things built to endure but already in decline. War relics, pipelines, obsolete machines—these carry more than function. They carry memory, direction, and belief. What draws me to these forms is how belief becomes embedded in the surface of things, through wear, design, and the way materials reflect systems long after those systems have broken down.
