My works are usually defined as site-specific installations, and they rely on the relationships between the object and the space that contains it. Through a formalist sculptural exploration that produces paradoxes within space, I try to touch upon biographical experiences, and raise issues related to identity and place.
Early on in my artistic career, I focused on issues related to the concept of home. My sculptures disrupted the exhibition space, creating within it pockets of sorts of a new space, with elements borrowed from domestic environments. The integration of these elements within the exhibition space made for an experience of formal and spatial defamiliarisation – an environment that was simultaneously exposed and blocked. The first spaces I created were born out of a childhood memory and charged with the tension due to the hybridization of a private place – usually some kind of hideout – and a public one. Later on, my works became more abstract, referring to geometrical shapes and structures, as a kind of monumental minimalism. In these works, I applied a syntax that merged between a universal formal language inspired by the historical modernist minimalism and distinctly contemporary local and biographical markers.
I work with charged materials such that their very encounter with intensive physical action creates a new space. I am interested in creating situations involving tension between tense, minimalist geographical shape and soft, gushing, and alluring material that imbues the shape with organic, even animalistic texture. This tension is inherent to the materials I use – essentially industrial materials with amorphous properties nevertheless. Usually, these are black materials such as industrial rubber, linoleum and tar: toxic materials that emit acrid odors, waste products that are decidedly unfriendly to the environment. The encounter between these materials and the space elicits implicit qualities out of them: what is rigid softens, and what suffocates gives birth to new life.
At first glance, my works may seem formalistic, minimalistic and unfeeling, but staying within them reveals the sensuousness of the material, the traces of body retained in it, the action performed within it, and the dualities it espouses: restraint versus obsession, harness as opposed to softness, geometricity vis-à-vis organicity. My purpose is that by staying at the site, the viewers would attain a mental state of reflection and introspection, thereby achieving a deeper connection between their body and space.