Earth Nidus began with my encounters with forms of nature that are easily overlooked in the city: plants growing through cracks, branches entangled with metal fences, and life taking hold in spaces designed for other purposes. These encounters informed my interest in natural phenomena and in the possibility of a mutated world continuing to grow beyond human intentions.

The series brings clay into contact with metal mesh, glaze, flock, and other manufactured materials. I push clay through the grid and allow the materials to affect one another during firing. The mesh may appear to contain or support the clay, yet the clay also spreads across it and changes its form. Their relationship recalls the meeting of organic growth and built structures in the city, where neither remains entirely separate from the other.

Across the works, this imagined ecology takes different forms. The vessels in Parallel World suggest nests or inhabitable spaces whose occupants remain unknown. The dense red surface of Earth Nidus Red makes growth feel both abundant and unsettling, while the green and crusted areas of Earth Nidus Green bring together signs we might read as vegetation, mineral, and industrial structure. Fragments reduces this world to a small piece, leaving its larger shape open to imagination.

Object-Oriented Ontology has informed my attempt to look beyond the human use of things and to take nonhuman objects and their relations seriously. In Earth Nidus, materials from nature and industry meet without one simply representing or serving the other. The works ask what might grow from their encounter—and why we so readily welcome some forms of life while finding others strange or difficult to accommodate.