SCULPTURE STUDIO
RAMÓN RAVÉ
UNIT 3
Masters Fine Art-Sculpture
Where art grows, decays, and begins again.
A collaboration with nature — a reflection on what it means to be alive and ever-changing.
EN OVUM - Visualization
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice investigates the relationship between human and non-human systems through sculpture made with living materials. I create works that merge fine art and biology, using mycelium as both medium and metaphor to explore transformation, interdependence, and regeneration.
I begin with a deliberate sculptural concept, shaping forms that embody human intention and control. Once introduced to the living organism, however, the work evolves beyond my direction — growing, decaying, and reshaping itself. This process becomes a collaboration between artist and nature, where each stage of change redefines the piece both materially and conceptually. The result is never fixed; like life itself, it exists in continuous transformation.
By working with mycelium, I embrace impermanence as an essential part of creation. The living material determines its own evolution, and in doing so, challenges our perception of authorship, control, and permanence. My process reflects a conscious surrender — an acknowledgment that while we cannot control external forces, we can choose how we engage with them.
Ultimately, my work seeks to reconnect art and nature, prompting reflection on coexistence and symbiosis. Through this dialogue between the human-made and the organic, I aim to inspire awareness of our place within living systems and the potential for a more harmonious way of being.
EN OVUM, Novel Image,2025
CRITICAL REFLECTION
Prologue — Opening the Air
From Control to Care
EN OVUM-first sketch
EN OVUM, plaster polymer, 50 x 50 x 50, 2025
EN OVUM, mycelium, 30 x 25 x 5 , 2025
EN OVUM, first demould result
EN OVUM, first demould result detail
Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art ,1969
Paper mache womb
Finished automatized womb
EN OVUM, Summer show display, 2025
Breathing to Live: Technical Adjustments and Clarity
EN OVUM, plaster polymer, summer show display, 2025
Mycelium head test timelapse
Thanks to this accumulation of experience and observation, I feel I’ve reached a solid foundation — the technical, biological, and material knowledge necessary to give life to the complete sculpture in mycelium. Not as an attempt, but as a mature practice that recognizes and integrates its limits.
Now I know that the work has moved from intuition to mastery, from experiment to method — and that the next step, the total work, stands on the certainty of having done everything within my sphere of control.
Exhibiting the Living: Ethics of Maintenance and Ecosystem
This technical learning — designing for airflow, properly draining the substrate, scaling gradually — brought with it a curatorial and ethical lesson.
How do you exhibit a work that can decay? What does it mean to show something alive without turning life into spectacle?
Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1969) had already taught me to think of maintenance as a form of care, but in the context of exhibition-making, my focus shifted from care to coexistence — from the act of maintaining a piece to the act of sharing space with it.
Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled , 2012
The Body, Authorship, and Becoming
Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled , 2012
At this stage, the human figure in my practice — a fetal form, suspended and contained within a womb — acquired a depth that no longer sought to illustrate ideas but to materialize them.
Working with living material has made the human body feel less like a boundary and more like a porous field — open, mutable, continuously negotiating its limits.
Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman ethics (2013) helps me articulate this transformation. She proposes decentering the human not to erase it, but to reposition it within a web of shared agencies — biological, technological, mineral. In her writing, vitality is not exclusive to living beings but distributed across matter itself, circulating through connections that bind the organic and the artificial, the human and the nonhuman.
EN OVUM, first attempt after demoulding
Each unmoulding becomes a moment of encounter, where the living asserts itself and I must respond, adapt, and let go.To create with mycelium is to accept that vitality exceeds me. It is to acknowledge that the sculpture, like the body, is never finished but always in flux — an open negotiation between persistence and change.Through this lens, the work is no longer a representation of life but a manifestation of life’s continuous becoming.
Rhythm and Attention: The Poetics of Slowness
Mycelium head test 7 days after demoulding
Mycelium head test 8 days after demoulding
Mycelium head test 9 days after demoulding
EN OVUM Test 1, plasticine, 30 x 25 x 5, 2024
There is a quiet beauty in that stance: a beauty that doesn’t depend on perfection but on integrity. When I care for the work, even as it falters, I am acknowledging that its life and mine are made of the same uncertainty. The piece and I share the same condition: to try, to fail, to continue.
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Anicka Yi’s Immigrant Caucus, 2017
Protocol: A Transmissible Practice
Patricia Piccinini, The young family, Silicone, fiberglass, leather, human hair, and plywood 33 ,85.1 × 149.9 × 120 cm
EN OVUM, inside womb, plaster polymer, cardboard, metal rope, fishing wire, FLAVA exhibition display, 2025
Mycelium Tests
Mycelium Tests
EN OVUM, process display, Unit 1 showcase
EN OVUM, test 1, AI video modification
Here, once again, Mierle Laderman Ukeles becomes a touchstone. Her notion of the art of maintenance reminds me that the invisible work sustaining what we see — the cleaning, tending, and preserving — is itself a gesture of connection. Extending that ethic to the audience turns maintenance into a collective act: a shared responsibility for what is fragile, alive, and evolving.
In this future stage of my practice, technology becomes not a tool of separation but of relation. Sound, light, and data serve as bridges between species — ways to remember that art, like life, grows only through attention, patience, and care.
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Mycelium Tests
Mycelium Test
EN OVUM, Plasticine, 50 x 50 x 50, 2025
Throughout my artistic practice, I’ve undergone a process that has forced me to rethink what it means to make a work when what is being made is not an inert object, but a living matter that grows, collapses, becomes contaminated, breathes, and demands conditions of care.
Clay, plaster, stone, metal, or fibre allow the comfort of control; mycelium, on the other hand, disarms my habits and reminds me that every decision about form and process is, at the same time, an ethical decision about how I relate to the living.
This reflection does not arise from a theory imposed afterwards, but from what happened in the studio: from sealed moulds that suffocate, from fungi that lose the battle to mould, from temperatures that, when exceeding 30°C, easily cancel out what the organism needs (20–24°C) to thrive. Along the way, control ceased to be a technical ideal and became a question: can my practice remain rigorous if I shift control toward care, observation, and listening?
I finished a complex mould after weeks of modelling, adjustments, and sealing tests. Instead of jumping straight into the living version, I spent a couple of weeks preparing a cast in polymer and fiberglass for the QEST Scholars exhibition at Guildhall.
That piece — clean, stable, technically precise — was born as a “Plan B” in the face of the uncertainty of the living work. On the surface, it was a pragmatic decision; underneath, it functioned as a mirror. I found myself holding onto a safe route — plaster and fiberglass — while longing for the uncertain one — the mycelium.
I discovered that often “Plan B” is not foresight but fear: fear that what one desires most might not work, fear of leaving behind a previous profession (my background as an architect), fear of stepping away from the comfort and supposed economic security of a steady job that, in truth, immobilizes.
This tension between security and risk was not only personal — it manifested materially in two pieces co-exhibited at Guildhall. The contrast was eloquent. The plaster piece, showing the highest level of detail, I could achieve while sculpting, generated a discreet reception; the first mycelium test, fragile yet alive, drew attention and conversation.
I confirmed that fragility communicates what “perfection” often conceals: that the living moves us because it is unresolved, because it can fail before us — and in that failure, it involves us.
I decided to continue along the living route. I carefully disinfected the mould and prepared the mix with wheat, oyster mushroom grain spawn, and nutrients, monitoring hydration times and density.
I filled the mould using gloves, a mask, and sterilized tools, avoiding air currents and uncertain surfaces, and added an internal metal armature to support the form once unmoulded.
I sealed the mould and left it to “gestate” for two weeks. When I opened it, the result was clear: incomplete colonization and dominant mould. I learned — and this is a lesson that continues to return — that inside the mould, a silent competition unfolds for food and space. When conditions shift even slightly, mould prevails and, unlike the oyster mushroom, it does not create a self-sustaining rhizomatic structure.
The piece collapsed; the mycelium had incorporated little material. What I preserved was a map of errors, annotated with date and time.
What could have been called “failure” became my method. I took obsessive notes: ambient temperature by the hour, humidity, substrate pasteurization time, the sequence and order of mould opening, the initial weight of each component, the tactile quality of the substrate (whether it drained or clumped), even the smell upon opening — a crucial clue for anticipating contamination.
Through this process, I began to understand, as Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter (2010), that matter is not passive, but animated by its own agencies — a field of vitality in which nonhuman forces act alongside and through us. Bennett’s notion of vital materialism gave me the conceptual framework to name what I was witnessing daily in the studio: the agency of the fungus asserting itself through temperature, humidity, and chance. Her writing helped me shift from seeing matter as a substance to be controlled to seeing it as a collaborator with its own rhythm and will.
Bennett’s invitation to recognize the “thing-power” of materials — their ability to make things happen — resonates profoundly with the behaviour of mycelium. Inside the sealed mould, the organism was never inert; it was negotiating, deciding, and adapting. Reading Bennett allowed me to articulate that what unfolds in these experiments is not simply a biological process but an ethical encounter — one that demands respect for what she calls “the vitality of matter.” This perspective dismantled the anthropocentric illusion of mastery that still lingers in sculpture, replacing it with a form of shared authorship.
At the same time, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969) offered me a vocabulary to understand the daily labour surrounding my work — the repetition, cleaning, observation, and care — not as peripheral tasks, but as the very substance of the practice. Ukeles’ insistence that maintenance is itself a creative, political, and aesthetic act aligned perfectly with my experience in the studio: sterilizing tools, recording data, calibrating humidity, discarding contaminated samples. These actions, once invisible, became gestures of commitment and continuity.
Ukeles writes about maintenance as an affirmation of life’s ongoing processes — a refusal to separate creation from care. In my practice, that realization meant that the sculpture did not begin when the mould was filled, nor end when it failed; the artwork extended into the acts of tending, documenting, and even dismantling. This understanding transformed the role of the artist from a maker of fixed objects to a custodian of living systems.
The distinction is fundamental: a movement from artist-creator to artist-maintainer, from author of a result to caretaker of a process. Both Bennett and Ukeles taught me that the studio is not a site of control, but a space of coexistence — one where art emerges not from mastery, but from attention, patience, and reciprocity.
Jane Bennett, Why the world is alive, 2010
I started over. I placed the mould in a cold room, covered it with a blanket to minimize contamination, and installed a sensor to monitor temperature and humidity.
In parallel, I built a hemispheric structure 150 cm in diameter — steel rods and chicken wire — covered with recycled cardboard previously soaked and bonded with diluted adhesive, like a large papier-mâché membrane: an artificial womb, initially conceived as a scenographic device to contain the sculpture in the exhibition space.
However, during a conversation with my tutor, a decisive conceptual shift occurred: there was no sense in simulating a womb if the real womb was the incubation chamber I had already built — the microenvironment where the fungus grew, collapsed, defended itself, and breathed. That observation redirected my attention from decor to ecology.
At that moment, I understood what Donna Haraway calls staying with the trouble (2016). Haraway proposes that instead of seeking closure or purity, we must inhabit the complexities of our entanglements with the world — human and nonhuman alike. The “trouble” is not a problem to solve, but a condition to dwell in, to learn from. In my case, the trouble was literal: contamination, failure, decay. But it was also conceptual — the impossibility of separating the artwork from its ecosystem.
Working with living material forced me to practice what Haraway describes as response-ability: the ability to respond ethically within a web of interdependence. The incubation chamber was not a symbolic device; it was a living ecology demanding attention, air, and patience. The mycelium was not a metaphor for life — it was life, insisting on its own terms.
Haraway’s thinking helped me abandon the impulse to aestheticize nature as an external image. Instead, I began to understand the studio as a shared habitat, a place where creation unfolds through cohabitation and negotiation. Staying with the trouble meant remaining present through uncertainty — allowing the work to become what it needed to be, rather than forcing it into the comfort of representation.
That insight changed the axis of my practice: from representation to relation, from symbol to system. The artificial womb no longer functioned as a prop but as a living environment — a site of exchange between human intention and nonhuman agency.
I moved the infrastructure to the exhibition space: humidifier, ventilation, lighting, and basic automation to avoid opening the container once unmoulded. I ran partial tests and thought I saw progress; I waited a few more days.
On Friday, against the clock, I unmoulded. The piece failed again. Some areas were colonized; others remained soft, and the whole structure couldn’t hold its shape. It was a double blow — technical, because it didn’t work, and existential, because once again I was facing the “Plan B.”I decided to destroy the piece carefully — not out of frustration, but because the smell of contamination made it unviable in the gallery, and preserving compromised material isn’t caring for a work; it’s spreading a problem.
I dismantled the “womb” and prepared the plaster polymer one. Then came another piece of news: the curatorial team couldn’t accommodate the womb installation — it couldn’t be shown.
At that moment, I returned to Stoic principles: I cannot control the weather, I cannot control the chance of mould piece not getting contaminated, I cannot control institutional communication — I can only control my attitude and my actions (Epictetus, 2008; Marcus Aurelius, 1997).
In that lesson, I found meaning in the Stoic practice of premeditatio malorum (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, c. 65 CE), a mental discipline that prepares the individual to face challenges by calmly imagining the worst possible scenario. It isn’t about attracting misfortune or acting out of fear but about recognizing that there will always be factors beyond our control, and that the desired outcome may not occur.
By consciously visualizing those possibilities, one strengthens mentally and spiritually, accepting that if they happen, one is already prepared to face them.
Working with living material means precisely that: accepting that control is limited — and that serenity in the face of the uncontrollable is also part of the creative process (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 1997).
The exhibition opened with the plaster polymer sculpture, and to my surprise, the public read the work as I had conceived it: a figure at the threshold, suspended in time, fragile in its containment. I understood that, even without the living organism, the process had sedimented meaning into the form.
After the Summer Show, without sentimentality or self-indulgence, I re-examined my notebooks. I identified a pattern: in the previous successful tests, the mould had not been airtight. My error — both technical and symbolic — was closing what needed to breathe.
During the summer, I experimented only with the head section of the mould, adding micro-vents. Two weeks later, I found complete colonization: white, fibrous, alive. The causal relation — oxygen — was evident; the metaphorical relation — giving air to the practice — was equally clear.
Through this reflection, I can now say that I have mapped and understood each factor that depends on me in the process. I’ve refined the technique, systematized the conditions, and honed the method with the patience born only from trial and error.
Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled (2012) became a central reference. For this work, Huyghe transformed a section of Kassel’s Karlsaue Park into a self-sustaining ecosystem — part garden, part compost heap, part open organism. Within it, a white greyhound with one pink leg wandered freely among wild plants and mounds of soil.
Nearby, a reclining nude statue hosted a living beehive that pulsed and grew over her head, fusing human form, object, and colony into a single living sculpture. Nothing in the piece was staged to remain stable: plants overtook objects, insects redefined boundaries, and the environment itself became the work.
What fascinates me about Huyghe’s approach is the way he relinquishes control. The artist becomes less a designer and more a facilitator, allowing the environment to compose itself through time, chance, and biological activity. His work doesn’t illustrate coexistence — it performs it.
That gesture resonates deeply with my own practice. Like Huyghe, I am drawn to the idea of creating conditions rather than compositions — systems in which form, material, and life are inseparable. Exhibiting a living or once-living sculpture becomes a question of ethics as much as aesthetics: how to sustain an environment without fixing it, how to preserve vulnerability without freezing it into representation.
In this way, the gallery ceases to be a neutral frame and becomes a responsive organism — one that breathes, reacts, and transforms in dialogue with the work. The curatorial act, then, is not about controlling visibility but cultivating balance: maintaining the fragile continuity between what grows, what decays, and what watches.
This vision mirrors what happens in my own studio. When I work with mycelium, I am no longer shaping an inert material; I am entering a dialogue with a living system that has its own rhythms, needs, and forms of expression.
The act of sculpting becomes one of mediation rather than domination — a conversation between temperature, humidity, biology, and intention.
Braidotti’s thought also reframes the question of authorship. If every process involves multiple agents — spores, air, metal, time — then the artist is not the sole author but a participant in an evolving assemblage.
Another layer consolidated over time: rhythm.
In his book "The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering " Byung-Chul Han (2015) describes our contemporary condition as a society of achievement — one driven by constant productivity, where the pressure to perform and accelerate erodes the capacity for deep experience. In such a culture, time flattens; everything becomes immediate, measurable, and disposable.
My practice, by working with living organisms, forced me into the opposite tempo. Growth does not obey deadlines. The mycelium demands slowness — the kind of time that cannot be optimized, only attended to. What Han calls “the time of contemplation” became, for me, a working principle: a rhythm grounded not in progress but in presence.
This slowness is not complacency; it is method. The work “advances” precisely when I resist the impulse to accelerate it. In this slower temporality, attention sharpens — observation replaces control. Each day of growth or microbial drift becomes a lesson in patience, in trust, in humility before the invisible rhythms that sustain life.
Han writes that true experience arises only in the intervals — in the pauses where nothing seems to happen. I have learned to dwell in those pauses. They are where the work breathes, where collaboration with the organism becomes visible. What might appear as inactivity is, in truth, the most active state of all: the quiet unfolding of transformation.
The Public as Co-Responsible
Failure has become one of my most honest teachers. Each collapse, each contamination, each loss of form has drawn the limits of what I can control — and revealed what I can only accompany.
At first, failure carried the weight of disappointment: the hours of preparation, the anticipation, the quiet hope that this time everything would work. But gradually, I began to see that what I called failure was not an interruption of the process — it was the process. It was the work teaching me how to look, how to listen, how to slow down.
When a piece collapses, it leaves behind a record of decisions — traces of care, of excess, of timing slightly missed. Those remains are not evidence of defeat but of dialogue: the material responding in its own way. The surface that folds, the texture that resists, the smell that warns — all these are forms of conversation.
Over time, I learned to approach these moments not as disasters but as landscapes. Each failed attempt maps the territory of the possible, showing where growth hesitates and where it flourishes. The studio becomes a site of observation rather than correction. The goal is no longer to achieve permanence, but to sustain curiosity — to remain present in the fragile balance between intention and surrender.
It is important for me to situate my practice in dialogue with artists who have expanded the boundaries between biology and art — those who approach life not as a subject to represent, but as a collaborator.
Anicka Yi’s Immigrant Caucus (2017) translates bacterial ecosystems into olfactory and atmospheric experiences that challenge how we perceive the nonhuman. In that work, Yi cultivated bacteria collected from Asian-American women and transformed them into a living scent installation, dissolving the distance between viewer and organism. Her practice invites us to inhabit invisible systems — to smell, breathe, and coexist with other forms of life. That sensorial intimacy resonates deeply with my own experiments, where air, humidity, and temperature become active components of the work.
Patricia Piccinini, on the other hand, uses hybrid, almost believable creatures to provoke empathy beyond the boundaries of the human. Her sculptures evoke tenderness and unease at once, confronting us with the possibility of care toward what feels both alien and familiar. I recognize a similar tension in my own pieces, where the human form emerges within a living system — vulnerable, interdependent, and in flux — an image that invites compassion rather than control.
I do not invoke these references to validate my work externally, but to map a conversation — a shared attempt to think through the ethics of coexistence. Their practices help me understand that every material decision — a filter, a minimal breathing grid in the mould, a lamp, a humidifier — is not merely technical but curatorial and political. Each adjustment defines how the work lives, how it relates, and how it asks others to care for it.
I return to the beginning to anchor the distinction that has reorganized my practice: Plan B as fear, or as method.
At first, it was fear — fear of failure, of uncertainty, of what might not work. Later, it became method — a way to hold space for the unpredictable and transform hesitation into structure.
Keeping the plaster piece does not mean giving up on the living work; rather, it allows communication to continue when the organism cannot. What has emerged is a polyphony of materials in which each one carries its own responsibility:
• Plaster holds the form in the absence of life.
• Mycelium carries life when conditions are right.
• The records — notebooks, videos, photographs, graphs — hold the memory of the process, allowing the research to remain transmissible and cumulative.
This constellation has made my practice less heroic and more sustainable. I no longer rely on moments of instant revelation, but on the slow, attentive work that makes favourable chance possible.
Formally, I remain anchored to a figurative threshold. The “unborn” form is not nostalgia for origin, but a sign of transitional time — a fragmented world that asks for gestures of reconnection. The sculpture, suspended in this in-between state, becomes a mirror for our own unfinished condition: fragile, interdependent, seeking continuity.
I do not aim to illustrate theories or represent concepts. What I seek is a sculpture that thinks through the body — matter in process that obliges both artist and viewer to feel before they understand. It is in that tactile and uncertain zone, where philosophy meets biology, that the work truly lives.
Over time, I’ve consolidated a method I can now articulate — because teaching others (or documenting for my future self) is part of this ethics:
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Preparation and sterilization by layers — tools, surfaces, containers, hands.
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Substrate formulation with drainage and porosity criteria, avoiding compaction.
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Mold design with built-in breathing — calculated micro-vents and demolding sequences that don’t tear rhizomatic areas.
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Environmental control and recording — temperature/humidity/CO₂ monitoring, and, when possible, basic automation.
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Observation windows and non-intervention protocols when thresholds are met.
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Clear criteria for withdrawal and safe disposal if contamination appears.
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Comprehensive archiving of each cycle — photos, notes, weights, smells, textures, durations.
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Post-process reflection connecting technical and conceptual aspects — what the work learned about itself, and what I learned from it.
This protocol doesn’t guarantee “perfect” results, but it ensures that every iteration becomes knowledge rather than mere repetition.
Even so, I do not idealize the organism.
My practice doesn’t romanticize “the natural.” If these experiments have taught me anything, it’s that life is not a homogeneous moral category, but a chemistry without intention — sometimes aligned with our desires, sometimes frustrating them.
That is where rigor lies for me: maintaining technical precision without forcing an outcome, holding space so that if life happens, it happens with dignity — and accepting withdrawal when it doesn’t.
There is beauty in that renunciation, because it preserves the possibility of return.
Looking ahead, I plan to incorporate bio-sonification — translating the electrical signals of the fungus into soundscapes — and to use light synchronized with the organism’s states.
These elements are not meant as spectacle, but as interfaces for listening: ways to make the invisible rhythms of life perceptible, to create moments of attunement rather than control.
Through sound and light, I want to invite others into the intimate tempo of the organism. Listening becomes a form of empathy — a shared act of presence. My hope is that these works will not “speak about” life but allow us to listen to it together.
I also want to develop museographic systems that encourage care rather than interference: vision windows, internal cameras, live data streams, and shared maintenance protocols with the audience.
The piece is an entity that requires daily attention and acknowledging that dependency transforms exhibition into collaboration.
I return to an idea that has marked my daily notes in the studio: perfection is often a mask for fear.
I’ve felt it many times — the impulse to postpone showing the work until “it’s perfect,” the urge to polish the living until uncertainty disappears. But working with organisms has taught me that uncertainty is not the enemy; it is the condition that allows life — and creation — to exist.
Over time, I’ve learned to change the question. Instead of asking, Is it perfect? I ask, Is it integral?
Integrity means the process was cared for, that each decision was coherent, that withdrawal — if it happened — was not defeat but clarity. It is the quiet assurance that what I did was honest, that I stayed present and attentive, that I respected the limits of what could be done.
For me, mastery no longer lies in control or flawlessness. It lives in the patient relationship between hand, mind, and matter — a relationship built through repetition, failure, and listening. The path is rarely smooth: there will always be resistance — the heat, the mould, the miscommunication, the timing that falters. But the task is not to clear the path; it is to keep walking with awareness, to let each obstacle teach rhythm and measure.
Perfection isolates; integrity connects. And in that connection — between the artist, the material, and the unpredictable — the work continues to breathe.
This critical reflection does not close a cycle — it opens one.
There is no “final solution” for growing mycelium in sculptural form; there is only an increasingly refined method of collaboration.
If, at the beginning, I protected myself with “Plan B” out of fear, today I can say I sustain multiple paths by method: a choral practice where living matter, inert matter, and the archive communicate to express something that none could say alone.
From now on, I want my studio to remain that laboratory where slowness is a value, observation a habit, and renunciation a form of wisdom — a place where sculpture is less an object and more a ritual of care, an honest conversation with what lives.
Conversations and Genealogies
The Workshop Protocol
Rigor Without Romanticism
Practice as an Open Cycle
Stoicism in Practice: The Premeditation of Misfortune
Failure as Method
Ecology of the Work: From Scenery to the Real Womb
Interfaces of Listening and Near Futures
Integrity Over Perfection
RESEARCH FESTIVAL
"EN OVUM"
DRAFT VERSION...
For the Research Festival, I will present a physical publication in progress, conceived as a narrative extension of my sculptural practice with mycelium.
After understanding the principles that sustain my work — rhizomatic growth, the ethics of care, and the tension between control and life — I wanted to translate that experience into literary language, to explore what living matter itself cannot express.
The publication takes the form of a novel set-in postwar London, where an architect seeks to become an artist while navigating the conflicts, losses, and revelations that accompany the act of creation. I am currently developing the first chapters, which combine linear narration with poetic fragments and excerpts from my studio diary. Throughout the story, different versions of the same character appear in parallel timelines, reflecting the inner transformations that also occur during the gestation of a living artwork.
However, the work itself — the material concept of EN ÕVUM — also becomes a character: a sentient entity that breathes within the narrative and infuses the text with a new layer of tactile and sensory perception. In this way, the novel does not merely recount a process; it embodies the vitality of the matter that inspires it.
Beyond telling a story, the project aims to reveal what usually remains invisible to the audience: the intimate experience of the artist during creation — their doubts, methods, and the emotional and philosophical dimensions that give form to the work.
The publication is conceived as a bridge between the studio and the public, between practice and reflection, offering a glimpse into creation as a process shared between the human and the living material.
The contribution of this work extends beyond the artistic field. For the reader — artist or not — it proposes a meditation on effort, failure, and transformation, inviting us to rethink creation not as an act of control but as a form of listening, care, and collaboration with what lives.
During the Research Festival, I will present a mock-up of the book accompanied by visual material, handwritten fragments, and process notes, proposing a dialogue between word, sculpture, and thought. This presentation will show both the conceptual development and the tangible progress of the project, revealing how writing becomes a living extension of the same creative ecosystem that gives rise to my sculptural work.
ADDITIONAL CONTENT
