tree (2024)

Tree is an interactive sound sculpture that explores mixed emotional states and the experience of living within prolonged uncertainty. The work engages with a liminal condition — an in-between state comparable to déjà vu — where one is suspended between accumulated past experiences and imagined or feared futures. This temporal instability reflects a contemporary condition shaped by ongoing crisis, where resolution is deferred and coexistence with instability becomes a mode of survival.

Constructed from founded materials — metal, plastic, glass, foam, moss, bullet casings, and light — the sculpture foregrounds the agency of matter itself. Drawing on ideas from new materialism, these materials are not passive remnants but active participants, carrying memory, affect, and resistance. Crumpled plastic forms a heart-like core, suggesting both vulnerability and endurance. Shattered glass, a broken vase, and traces of bullet casings reference rupture, violence, and historical trauma, while moss and flowers emerge from within these remains, refusing a linear narrative of destruction followed by recovery.

Rather than proposing healing as replacement, Tree operates within an ecology of coexistence, where damage and growth unfold simultaneously. This aligns with trauma theory and ecological thought that understand regeneration not as erasure of harm, but as life continuing with its scars. The work embodies a form of “damaged vitality,” where fragility becomes a condition for sensitivity and responsiveness rather than weakness.

The sculpture is composed from a spectrum of affective states — guilt, anger, anxiety, sadness, joy, envy, and fleeting moments of pleasure — reflecting affect theory’s understanding of emotions as overlapping, contradictory, and non-hierarchical. These emotions circulate through the object as vibrations, resonances, and tensions, inviting the viewer into a shared sensory field.

Tree can be read simultaneously as the body of a future world and the body of a future human: posthuman, hybrid, and interdependent with its environment. It suggests a form of resilience that does not rely on purity or wholeness, but on the capacity to remain responsive, porous, and alive amid ongoing uncertainty.