"'virgin"" 2025

My current research explores the tension between function and non-function through sculptural forms that question the boundaries of utility, comfort, and material behavior. By reimagining furniture and domestic objects as sites of transformation and vulnerability, I examine how materials possess agency, intimacy, and a life of their own.
Working across ceramics, steel, wood, silicone, and glass, I engage processes of both construction and collapse. A broken porcelain stool, a welded steel table that feels animal-like, and a fur-covered stool all gesture toward a domestic space that resists stability. Recent experiments include casting my toes in silicone to create a wall installation of one hundred fragmented forms, evoking both intimacy and estrangement. Through these works, I investigate how the human body and material surfaces reflect and distort one another.
Drawing from material theory and feminist ecology, particularly Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and Donna Haraway’s concept of kinship, my practice frames material as collaborator rather than subject. Metals oxidize, ceramics fracture, and textures shift from industrial to organic, producing objects that oscillate between decay and resilience.
My sculptural work extends my anthropological research into the culture of consumption. By manipulating industrial and domestic materials steel, ceramics, and reclaimed objects I explore how consumer habits shape our built environments and personal identities. Transforming functional objects into sculptural forms becomes a way to reveal the social and emotional economies underlying design and daily use.

+

I use steel and aluminum because they embody the language of industry mass production, labor, and infrastructure. By bringing these materials into sculptural and domestic contexts, I highlight the tension between spaces built for efficiency and the intimate environments we inhabit. Their rigidity and permanence contrast with the softer, more vulnerable qualities of home, allowing me to question how industrial forces shape our daily lives.


Future directions include integrating sound into porcelain sculpture, developing steel furniture futuristic world building structures, and continuing research into patinas and surface transformation. Through these explorations, I aim to expand the dialogue between sculpture and design, proposing a poetics of making in which failure, repair, and transformation become central to understanding our material kinship with the world.