1. Material Encounter

One of the earliest problems I carried into sculpture was perceptual: how a three-dimensional form changes as it is seen from different positions. A sculpture cannot be taken in from one view. As I move around it, the form changes. I became interested in forms that could not be settled by a single silhouette.

Working physically changed that question. There is the dead weight of steel, the mineral compound that refuses a clean cut, the surface that pushes back against the polishing hand. I can plan, carve, weld, grind, and polish, but the material does not simply follow the movement I have in mind.

I did not want to remove that resistance from the process. It became part of the work. The question I had brought to sculpture was now being worked out inside weight, hardness, friction, and the limits of the hand.

2. Prima Materia

I explore the properties of diverse substances through casting, welding, burning, and oxidation. One result of these pursuits is my prima materia—a proprietary compound of marine calcite, fossilized bone, quartz, and polymer. Each batch is singular and yields unrepeatable results. I carve and polish the compound through classical subtractive techniques. The finished surface can appear seamless even though the substances within it remain materially distinct. The tension is both optical and material.

Prima materia takes several forms. It often accumulates into heavily encrusted bodies, monolithic masses, or twisting trajectories that rise vertically. Biological, mineral, and metallic elements enter the same structure, making forms that can feel geological and industrial at once. At other times, as in the Orb Materia series (2026), it is distilled into a sphere, polished to a precise, luminous mineral surface.

Metal is equally structural. I work with steel, stainless steel, rebar, copper, brass, silver, and aluminum, moving between corrosion, oxidation, and high polish. Rebar and steel rods can extend from the mineral mass as armature and as visible linear elements. They carry weight, but they also establish tension against the denser carved body. The work has to carry its mass and remain structurally stable even when the final form appears suspended or opens into space.

For me, prima materia is where geological time, material resistance, and structural reality meet through sustained physical work.

3. Genuine Error

Genuine Error does not begin by leaving things loose. The armature has to work. The structure has to hold. The compound has to be developed. The carving and subtraction have to be deliberate. The surface has to reach its final condition.

I work as far as my ability allows me to determine the result. Before that point, the unexpected tells me very little. Only when I have exhausted what I can determine does what remains beyond prediction become meaningful. Genuine Error becomes possible when control has been taken seriously enough to reach its limit.

I build the compound, carve it, subtract from it, and polish it. Much of that work may disappear from view. The surface itself can emerge only at the end of a long accumulation of material and labor, and what finally appears is not something I can completely prescribe in advance.

The unforeseen result is not automatically valuable. I still have to recognize the occurrence, consider its circumstances, and decide whether it should remain. It may be worth retaining. Or the work may simply have failed. That judgment can come only after I have done everything I know how to do.

Genuine Error is not the opposite of control. It appears at the limit of control. When it succeeds, it can reveal something inaccessible through deliberate authorship alone.

4. Perceptual Turn I

Over time, my concern with material resistance opened into a different question: what happens to perception through the encounter?

In the studio, that question becomes concrete. The hand meets resistant matter, error arises, and perception shifts in real time. A form I did not intend can suddenly appear as a possibility. I began to recognize that resistance could redirect perception.

5. Perceptual Turn II

The body has learned. Through repetition and training, accumulated craft knowledge becomes embodied. When deliberate planning reaches its limit, the hand understands before the mind can name it. This does not happen outside discipline. It is produced by it.

6. Perceptual Turn III

Near the end of carving prima materia, a rotary tool does not move evenly across materials of different hardness. A hard shell embedded in softer resin resists the cut and remains higher while the bit slips away from the line I intended. At first, I brace against it and bring the tool back under control. But after the same redirection happens again and again, I sometimes see that the resulting relief is better than the form I had planned.

Matter did not decide that the new form was better. I did. But the redirection made that judgment possible. Once I register the shift, I work differently. The work changes, and I have to look again.

After encountering this sequence enough times, I needed a way to describe what was happening.

7. Flux Ontology

When I began using the term Flux Ontology, I was trying to describe the autonomy and resistance I had encountered in matter. At that point, my thinking was still centered on material philosophy. The term helped me name what was already happening in the studio: intention changed, material conditions changed, perception changed, action changed, and the emerging form changed with them.

But my attention was already moving elsewhere. I became increasingly concerned with the perceptual shift that accompanied matter’s refusal. I no longer use Flux Ontology as the framework for the whole practice. I keep it because it records a particular stage in my thinking.

From there, the material question returned me to an older problem of form.

8. Moving Viewpoint

The older problem was still there: a sculpture could not be settled from one position.

In the forthcoming Hydroascendant, one view seems to resolve into a narrow vertical body. A few steps around it, a large opening becomes visible and the upper form reads as a broad arch. Moving again, that arch almost disappears as the same mass extends into a long diagonal sweep. The object has not moved. Yet its main structure seems to have changed.

After working through materials that corrode, accumulate, fuse, and resist, I could no longer return to movement as appearance alone. I had already spent years trying to keep fluidity, arrested motion, and forms caught mid-flow without losing what change and resistance had done to the material.

By the time I returned to that question, the form had to remain unsettled from one view to the next, while the material still carried the effects of that history. Both had to survive in the same sculpture.

But the sculpture was still a physical object.

9. Gravity

Another older problem of form was gravity.

When I build a freestanding sculpture, I sometimes suspend component parts from the ceiling before joining them together. The suspension lets me test positions that could not yet stand on their own. If the structure is too stable, it becomes boring. I push it further. Then the support may become too weak. I adjust it again. At some point the temporary suspension has to come off. The sculpture has to stand.

I had been working with this problem for years before I could describe it clearly. I was not interested in pretending that gravity had disappeared, but I was equally uninterested in forms whose stability was obvious. I wanted the object to come close to precariousness while remaining physically real. The form could appear unstable only if the structure beneath it was exact.

Years later, in Three-Legged Idols (2023–2024), I made a recurring structural trait explicit. Variations of a three-legged stance had already appeared in earlier sculptures, often without being obvious. The series exposed that principle: once an object could stand, the rest of the form could become less predictable.

Gravity can make the work fall. It cannot tell me what the form should be.

10. Non-Representation

A pipe does not have to remain a pipe. Bone does not have to represent bone. I had worked this way long before I could explain it. Whether a material is found or newly purchased matters less to me once it enters the work. Its previous identity does not have sovereignty over what it can become.

This does not mean that I never have an image in mind. An image may arrive suddenly and powerfully. At other times, it comes much later. But even then, the image does not have final authority. Construction changes it. Material resistance can change it again.

I have said before that my sculptures are not abstract, but based on a physicality of construction. I build the thing. When the work is finished, someone may see a rabbit, a rib cage, a flower, or something else I never intended. I do not need to correct them. Non-representation, for me, is not a prohibition against recognition. It is the condition that no prior identity or predetermined image gets to decide what the sculpture must become.

But if a predetermined image does not decide, what does?

11. Surrender Has a Boundary

Relinquishing intention is not relinquishing judgment.

In 2021, I was building a large sculpture from components I had developed separately. None of the parts had failed. If anything, they were too finished. The assembled work was competent, even interesting, but for its scale it still remained inside a familiar language of assemblage. I looked at it and thought: this is not me.

So I dispersed it. All retained. All rejected. I kept the components, but not the organization that had made them one work. By then, almost everything was already finished. Those components later became three works in 2023 and 2025; the 2025 work was shown in Manila in Mare Fecunditatis.

I permit the work to contradict me, but I have spent decades developing the judgment necessary to recognize when that contradiction matters. Mastery does not guarantee that the original plan should prevail. Sometimes mastery itself lets me see that I have pushed the work too far in one direction.

Escaping my intention is not enough. The work still has to survive judgment.

12. Optimism

Optimism, for me, is not the belief that things will turn out well. It is a way of working under finite conditions.

When five components would be enough for a work, I may make thirty. I do not necessarily know what the others will become. But when an image arrives, I tend to work quickly. If I have to stop to fabricate everything it requires, the image may be gone. The accumulated parts give me more freedom at the moment I need it. The oracle has infrastructure.

The brass spikes I originally planned for the 2027 exhibition followed this logic. I kept making them until there were around a hundred, then decided to remove that work from the exhibition and let the spikes become the basis for something later. There is no guarantee that later will arrive, or that I will be able to use them when it does. I make them anyway.

I have also postponed larger ambitions. I could have continued the direction of Wind from 2016, but I did not. Over the following years, the work passed through other forms, materials, scales, and skills. By 2027, postponing that ambition seemed riskier than attempting it. Waiting can increase what becomes possible, but it also consumes the same finite time in which the work has to be done.

I do not trust the future enough to expect it to cooperate. That is why I prepare for it now. Optimism is the decision to invest present labor in a possibility whose outcome I cannot control.

But this still does not explain why I continue to make at all.

13. Necessity

I do not have a complete answer to why I continue to make.

I did not become a sculptor because I was generally in love with art as a field. I wanted to make physical, three-dimensional things, and sculpture was where that need belonged. There have been periods when I would have been content for the need to disappear. It returned.

I can explain much of what happens once I enter the studio. Structure has to hold. Materials have limits. Skill can be trained. Judgment can stop a plan, disperse a work, or postpone an ambition. Time and the body are finite. None of this requires mystery.

But those explanations begin after the urge to work is already present. Whatever keeps the work moving must still pass through a body, matter, time, and judgment. Necessity does not remove responsibility.

I did not entirely choose this. But I remain responsible for what I do with it.