Totems 2025 – ongoing

Vertical assemblages where faces, creatures, plants, and ornamental elements stack into improbable columns. The Totems series layers forms from different times and cultures – a classical mask beneath a mythical creature, geometric patterns supporting organic forms, architectural details meeting fantastical creatures.

The stacking is intuitive and playful, creating collages across centuries: elements that would never coexist suddenly share the same axis, building upward into pillars that are part shrine, part joke, part question mark. Each combination suggests narratives without insisting on them.

The sculptures are gilded with 24-carat gold leaf – a choice connecting to the symbolic weight of gold across cultures and eras. What was considered sacred was cast in gold. Here, these invented assemblages receive the same treatment, elevating playful mythologies into objects that carry ceremonial presence.

In white clay, the same forms reveal their construction more clearly – the joins, the layers, the way each element nestles into or emerges from the one below. These versions feel more archaeological, like objects excavated from temple ruins or discovered in forgotten ceremonial sites.

The work investigates what happens when symbols from different eras stack into new hierarchies – guardians, ornaments, markers of something not quite nameable. Playful archaeology, perhaps. Pillars of a society that exists only in the sculpture itself.

Facials Totem 2018

A precarious tower of faces, stacked one atop another – a vertical procession of petrified expressions held together by wooden dowels, as if specimens pinned for study or ancestors assembled in memory. This totemic sculpture transforms individual clay fragments into a collective presence, where each face maintains its distinct character while contributing to a larger, unstable whole.

White clay faces and forms rise in tiers, separated and connected by simple wooden armatures. The structure suggests both construction and archaeology – something being built and something being excavated. Each level reveals different expressions, different textures, different moments of making captured and frozen in clay.

The sculpture is crafted from clay, providing a natural texture and form. Chicken wire is used to create a sturdy framework, supporting the overall structure. Wood adds an organic element, enhancing the design’s aesthetic appeal. The artwork stands approximately 65 cm in width, 65 cm in depth, and reaches a height of 200 cm, making it a prominent feature in any space.

The work plays with weight and fragility, permanence and precariousness. The clay elements appear heavy, earthy, yet the entire structure feels as if it could topple at any moment. Chicken wire reinforces the internal structure, holding together what might otherwise collapse – a skeleton for dreams rendered material.

This is memory made vertical. Faces stacked like sedimentary layers, like generations, like the accumulation of selves we carry through time. Each fragment a petrified expression traveling through centuries, each tier a different dream, a different desire, assembled into something that reaches upward while remaining firmly rooted in clay and earth.