Still, much so for all of them; for the past couple of years, the tension that drives my studio practice most has been between analog and digital. My work comes from physical, analogue techniques (sculpture, material handling, hands-on processes), but I’ve been expanding my research into how to bring these traditional forms into dialogue with digital techniques. This isn’t about replacing analogue with digital, but about finding ways for both to coexist, reflecting the current information age we are now in. That interplay opens new ways to think about materiality, embodiment, and how cultural symbols circulate today.

I would need to say it's still a credit card. In A Monument to What Weighs Nothing but Costs Everything from 2021, I laser-cut a steel version of my credit card, scaling it up into a solid, heavy object. I still remember picking it up from the company; four friends had to help me carry it to my studio, and in that moment it hit me: ironically, I had literally created the burden and weight that come with capital. The work became more than a reflection on wealth; by turning something so small and everyday into a monumental, burdensome sculpture, I had recreated the capitalist system on my own, making its invisible pressures and responsibilities tangible.

I see them as inseparable. The signs and symbols I work with are always connected to my own experiences. The materials I choose, the imagery I use, even the themes I explore carry traces of my personal history, memories, and cultural background. Even when I’m addressing broader social or political ideas, my own life shapes how I interpret and present them. For me, the personal and the symbolic are always intertwined, because the work isn’t just about abstract concepts. It’s also about how those ideas intersect with my life and perspective.

When I work autobiographically, there is always a hint of confession present, and I don’t try to avoid that. It is part of what makes the process feel alive and, in a way, it empowers me. But with Masking Monsters: SSRI, the personal element needed a formal structure around it so it wouldn’t collapse into straightforward self-disclosure. Choosing industrial aluminium sheets and arranging them in a strict vertical format created a protective distance. The material is cold, rigid, and impersonal, and it anchors the work in a broader context. The flowers that form the letters introduce vulnerability, but the metal keeps everything from drifting into sentimentality. The contrast between these two materials allows the emotional tension to be felt without being spelled out. This formal balance — and life itself is all about balance — is what keeps the piece from becoming a confession. My experience becomes one thread in a much larger reflection on psychological strain, seasonal dissonance, and the quiet negotiations we make with ourselves to keep going.

One of the most generative misreadings occurred with my recent work Soft Burden, Hard Shell: Bearing weight beyond the body. I genuinely enjoy it when people misread my work because it opens a space for dialogue, and I’m a curious person who likes to listen and understand how different minds decode the same object. But this particular misreading surprised me. After I posted images of the piece online, several people congratulated me on my “pregnancy.” They assumed the work was a baby announcement, a gender reveal, or some symbolic baby-shower gesture. In reality, the piece deals with invisible emotional labour, care work, and the weight we carry beyond the physical body, especially forms of labour that are undervalued or erased. The armour torso, the embedded farm leaves, and the tension between softness and hardness were meant to speak about vulnerability, memory, and the structures that shape our identities. But because many people saw it only through the filter of social media, the work was immediately interpreted through the visual language of that platform, which is filled with family milestones and personal announcements. That misreading taught me how drastically social media can flatten nuance and reduce a complex artwork to a familiar template. In the end, the misunderstanding became useful. It pushed me to think more deeply about the aesthetics of care, the visual codes of vulnerability, and the ways digital platforms shape meaning. It also confirmed why I make the work I do and how important it is to stay attentive to the narratives that form around it, even the unintended ones.

Testing whether a sign still works outside its original context is always a tricky question for me, because in a way my entire practice is about pulling signs out of their original frames and seeing what new narratives they can hold. I rarely test a symbol in isolation; I test it by building a narrative around it and watching how it behaves within a new ecosystem of meaning. In Yesterday’s Tomorrow (Eden), for example, the whole project began with this act of displacing and recharging signs. I took motifs that traditionally belong to religious painting and moral allegory (paradise, temptation, innocence) and placed them inside a contemporary capitalist landscape. The references to Bosch and Brueghel were not about imitation but about tension: what happens when symbols from art history meet the architecture of consumerism and the imagery of modern power structures? Does the sign still communicate paradise, or does it reveal something entirely different? By expanding the work across multiple spaces for the solo exhibition, I pushed this even further. I wanted to see whether the old symbols could survive in a world shaped by wealth, speed, and global ambition, or whether they would fracture and expose new readings.

For me, within Live Laugh Labour, the word labour also points to a kind of work that’s usually pushed out of sight, which is the unpaid, feminised, care-oriented labour that keeps everything running but rarely gets acknowledged. The exhibition plays with the hollowness of Live Laugh Love, a popular slogan repeated until it loses meaning, and replaces “love” with “labour”, which today feels like the real force structuring our lives. But of course I’m interested in the forms of labour that don’t make it into economic language: caring, holding things together, absorbing pressure, maintaining relationships, carrying expectations. Works like Soft Burden, Hard Shell deal with this directly: the tension between protection and vulnerability, strength and caregiving, and the way these roles are still, unfortunately, gendered in our society.