Sculptures

From waste to worlds

I began building my first major sculpture, Amalgamea, in 2012. As is often the case with my work, I kept adding layer upon layer of materials, details, electronics and light. The process produced a growing quantity of offcuts, and throwing them away felt wrong. Instead, I began constructing a second sculpture alongside it, using whatever remained.

Before long, I had exhausted those leftovers and started searching my apartment for broken objects and things that had been gathering dust. I was surprised by how much we accumulate without using. Friends soon began bringing me their unwanted objects too, gradually becoming part of the creative process. Three years and more than 25,000 components later, the sculpture became Recycled Future.

The work made me think more deeply about consumption, waste and our constant desire for something new. Shopping is supposed to reward our hard work and make us happy, yet we become bored increasingly quickly—often replacing objects simply because a newer version has appeared or the old one is no longer fashionable.

For artists, discarded objects offer an extraordinary source of free material. Many are already beautifully designed and require little more than imagination, basic tools and glue to begin a second life. Since then, I have developed a sculptural language combining reclaimed materials, light, sound and storytelling—sometimes creating what I call “theatres in a box.”

I hope tomorrow’s cars, buildings and roads will be made from yesterday’s waste. Perhaps art can help lead the way towards that future—and towards a new chapter in art history: Recyclism.

Amalgamea is a speculative carbon-based life form from TRAPPIST-1e, an oceanic planet some 40 light years from Earth. Recreated from DNA blueprints received by an advanced Astro-Lab, she inhabits rocky coastal regions shaped by prolonged daylight, extreme cold and the dim glow of an ultra-cool red dwarf star.

Part plant, part crustacean and part predator, Amalgamea feeds through photosynthesis but also hunts smaller creatures. Her illuminated body, talons, horns and intricate markings reflect the unusual ecosystem in which she evolved, while her reproductive behaviour remains a mystery to scientists.

Set in the year 2096, the work also turns its attention back towards Earth. As humanity searches for life on distant planets, it continues to damage the biodiversity of its own world. Amalgamea asks whether our fascination with alien nature might finally teach us to value—and protect—the life already surrounding us.

Amalgamea

2012-2016

resin treated paper (+pencil,markers), wood, oil paint, metal mesh, various plastics, LED lights and more.

Metropolis

2021-2025

120x60x70cm (without the base)

Encased in 2 way mirror,

made of circa 40k upcycled objects, 2700 LED lights, produced sound and the original story.

a quick video

Metropolis is a large-scale illuminated sculpture built from more than 40,000 reclaimed objects, including electronics, toys, plastics, metals and everyday discarded materials. Developed over several years, it transforms fragments of the real world into a dense futuristic city filled with hundreds of individual buildings, elevated routes and hidden spaces. 2700 of programmed LEDs animate the work, while a layered soundscape introduces characters, voices and stories from within the city. The sculpture is designed as a complete world rather than a single object, rewarding close observation and repeated visits. Its architecture combines humour, social commentary, science fiction and speculative ideas about how people may live in the future. Many of its buildings have their own purpose, identity and mythology, creating the impression of a functioning civilisation. Metropolis also became the physical foundation for Metropoliverse, a digital world being developed from detailed scans and photographs of the sculpture. Through this evolution, the artwork is expanding beyond the gallery into gaming, artificial intelligence and new forms of social interaction.

(for the digital-visit: metropoliverse.com)

2017-2020

90x90x60cm (without the base)

reclaimed objects, clay, LED, kinetics, original sound&story

a quick video

The Colony on Mars 2071 was created at a time when the idea of colonising Mars was capturing the public imagination. I have always been fascinated by the cosmos, the future of humanity and the possibility of building entirely new worlds beyond Earth. I had followed Elon Musk’s career since around 2010 and, at the time, found his ambitions for space exploration particularly compelling. The sculpture was intended to introduce people to that vision, but always with a pinch of salt, humour and healthy scepticism.

The work eventually became the centrepiece of Mars & Beyond, a four-week exhibition in Central London that brought together art, science, performance and speculative ideas about life beyond our planet. I later presented the sculpture at the Space-Comm Expo in Farnborough, which led to an invitation to visit Skyrora’s rocket factory in Scotland. The sculpture also received an award sponsored by the Chinese space agency, giving the project an unexpected international connection to real-world space exploration.

At its heart, the work asks both an exciting and unsettling question: will humanity ever truly colonise the Red Planet-and, if we do, what kind of civilisation will we build there?

The Colony On Mars 2071

Recycled Future

2012-2016

90x90x60cm (without the base)

2 way mirror encasing

90% Recycled materials, LEDs,

Original Soundscape and story 10min

The work reflects our appetite for consumption: how quickly possessions lose their appeal and are replaced or forgotten. It also became a defining piece in my artistic development, establishing an approach based on accumulation, transformation and discovering new possibilities in what others discard.

The sculpture grew instinctively, without a fixed design. When the original leftovers ran out, I cleared my apartment of broken possessions, forgotten components and objects gathering dust. I was astonished by how much apparently useless material one person could accumulate without noticing.

Friends soon began bringing me their unwanted objects rather than throwing them away. Their contributions turned the sculpture into a collective archive of possessions that had passed through many different lives. Completed after three years, Recycled Future contains more than 25,000 individually positioned elements. From a distance, it resembles an elaborate futuristic city. Up close, the illusion breaks apart, revealing a world built from familiar, obsolete and discarded things.

I began creating Recycled Future in 2013, while working on my first major sculpture. My process produced a growing quantity of fragments and leftovers. Throwing them away felt wrong, so I began using them to build a second artwork.

a quick stopmotion video

Garbage Collector

2014-2015

Various plastics, metals and glass.

LEDs

4 minute rap song about the GC

Garbage Collector is a futuristic sculpture imagining an artificial organism designed to survive by cleaning the waste humans leave behind. Created from reclaimed electronics and LED lights, its hybrid, vulture-crab-like body appears part machine, part scavenger and part newly evolved species. It flies over abandoned landfills and polluted waters, searching for useful components and plastic to use as fuel. Its basic artificial intelligence identifies, repairs and attaches salvaged electronic parts, allowing the creature to grow after every expedition. A semi-organic engine consumes plastic without releasing fumes or toxic by-products, transforming one of humanity’s most persistent pollutants into energy. As Garbage Collector becomes larger and heavier, it gradually loses its ability to fly. Eventually, it gives birth to a new generation of scavenging cleaners, creating an evolving ecosystem assembled from humanity’s discarded technology. Both hopeful and unsettling, the sculpture asks whether nature and intelligent machines will ultimately have to repair the environmental damage caused by human consumption.

Babel

2014-2015

70x70x130cm

Broken motherboards & electronics, plastics, marbles, various chemicals, LEDs,

custom sound and story.

This is an artwork that reimagines the biblical Tower of Babel as a monument to the internet age. Created in 2016–2017 from discarded computer components, plastics and insulation foam, the 130-centimetre, 70-kilogram structure rises like a dense technological organism. In the ancient story, a shared language allows humanity to unite around the impossible ambition of building a tower that reaches the heavens. Today, digital technology has given us another common language and another collective construction: a global network built and expanded by billions of people.The sculpture celebrates this extraordinary exchange of knowledge while questioning the pride, dependency and hunger for perfection that accompany it. Its crowded layers of obsolete circuitry suggest a civilisation becoming more powerful, interconnected and complex, but also increasingly unstable. By transforming discarded technology into an imposing new tower, Babel connects technological progress with the physical waste and forgotten devices left in its wake. The work asks whether our connected world is leading humanity towards greater understanding, or simply repeating an ancient mistake on a planetary scale.

A quick Video