GUILDHALL - QEST
SCHOLARS EXHIBITION
As a QEST scholar, I took part in the annual exhibition held at Guildhall, London, where the scholars presented the work developed through the support of the scholarship.
In my case, I exhibited two pieces belonging to the same project, EN ÕVUM: the first, a 30 cm sculpture made with mycelium; the second, a full cast in plaster polymer and fiberglass (50 × 50 × 50 cm).
It was a deeply revealing experience. Although the plaster piece displayed the highest technical level I had achieved in my figurative sculptural practice — with precise detailing and an impeccable finish — the audience was visibly more drawn to the living, imperfect, and somewhat uncertain work. The fragility of the mycelium elicited a different kind of reaction: viewers did not simply look; they approached slowly, softened their voices, and even adjusted their breathing in the presence of the piece.
There was a kind of silent choreography between the work and the audience — a shared gesture that confirmed for me that the living provokes a form of empathy that inert matter cannot. That moment marked a turning point in my research. I understood that the value of my practice lies not only in formal virtuosity, but in the ability to create a space of relation between matter and viewer. Mycelium, by its organic nature, awakens both sensory and ethical awareness: it reminds us that we too are living matter — vulnerable and constantly transforming.
This realization strengthened my decision to continue along the path of living material and to expand my research toward a narrative and reflective dimension. The audience’s response at Guildhall worked as a mirror of my own process. I realized that the true potential of EN ÕVUM does not reside only in its material outcome, but in the encounter it generates — between the living and the molded, the artist and the spectator, control and chance. It was this experience that gave rise to the idea of transforming my research into a physical publication — a novel capable of translating into literary language what happens in the studio but what the audience never directly experiences: waiting, doubt, necessary destruction, slow learning, and the ethics of care. In this way, my practice has branched beyond the sculptural object.
EN ÕVUM continues as a living project that now incorporates writing and philosophical reflection, while its core remains the same: the exploration of life as matter and art as a form of care. Through the Guildhall exhibition and the audience’s response, I confirmed that my work holds the potential to open a sensitive dialogue between the viewer and living matter — proposing a new way of understanding contemporary creation: not as mastery over form, but as coexistence with what breathes, changes, and eventually dies.
In that sense, the publication I will present at the Research Festival functions as the natural continuation of this experience: a written extension that invites the reader — artist or not — to enter that intimate space of the creative process, to feel what is normally unseen. Like the sculpture, the novel turns the concept itself into a character, offering a new layer of tactile and sensory sensitivity to artistic practice and to the reflection on the living.
