This series starts with a technique I've worked with for years: bentwood. Thin strips of wood are bent underpressure, glued together, and left to sit until they hold their new shape. What was once straight stays curved.Coming from a background in wood furniture design, I've never thought of wood as a dead material. To me, it'salive. It has its own grain, a direction it grew in slowly over a long time, a memory of how it once reached towardthe sun. It has pores and fibres. It breathes. It warps, shrinks, swells. Tim Ingold, in The Perception of theEnvironment, writes that making is not about forcing form onto matter, but about "a correspondence betweenmaker and material" "materials think in us, as we think through them." If that's true, then bending wood is nevera neutral act. The wood doesn't forget the direction it came from. It just isn't allowed to keep going that wayanymore.

 

This is what brings me back to my own Indigenous heritage, and to the stories my grandmother used to tell me— the long history of colonisation and assimilation behind them. Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, writesthat every colonised people is one "in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death andburial of its local cultural originality." What stays with me isn't the "inferiority complex" — it's the word burial.Something pressed down under the surface, out of sight, but still there. The change doesn't announce itself asloss. It just becomes the shape of how you live.And through my grandmother, I came to see that she had been living inside that shape and that the shapecarried on, all the way down to me. She told me stories without realising she was telling me aboutdisappearance.

 

Growing up between two worlds: part Paiwan, part Han Chinese, raised on the plains far from the mountain. I'venever been able to fully belong to either side. But that distance is also what gives me the space to look back.Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, writes: "This slowing down, or lagging, impels the 'past', projects it,gives its 'dead' symbols the circulatory life of the 'sign' of the present, of passage, the quickening of thequotidian. Where these temporalities touch contingently, their spatial boundaries metonymically overlapping, atthat moment their margins are lagged, sutured, by the indeterminate articulation of the 'disjunctive' present.Time-lag keeps alive the making of the past."

 

That slow time is what this work sits inside. Assimilation doesn't arrive all at once; it works as a long, delayedpressure. And the past isn't something I just inherit — it's something still being made.The woodcarvings I grew up seeing in the tribe were mostly masculine, outward-facing, ceremonial —expressions of honour meant to be seen. What I'm trying to make is something quieter, more fragile: the residueof a direction that was never allowed to continue. Not a monument, but a trace. Not a declaration, but a dreamheld in the interstice.

 

It's the shape pressure leaves behind — in wood, in culture — and from that shape, a different kind of beautystarts to open up.