Choppromises (2025)
Keywords: Anthropology, Identity, Ethnography & Materiality
Installation overview of the graduation show at WDKA (2025), Choppromises – burnt ceramic sculptures in various sizes, 2025.
Oh, the hush of trees, how they cradle our secrets in their shade. With every step beneath their canopy, we carry hopes unspoken. And when words feel too fragile for the air, we press them into bark, small carvings, quiet vows, left behind like footprints in wood. A name, a shape, a promise held still in time. Not shouted, but etched. Not forgotten, but waiting.
The installation consists of ceramic sculptures that echo the forms of cut tree trunks, their bark surfaces inscribed with carved writings and symbolic markings of promises made in forests. Presented as a graveyard of collective memory, the work embodies fragments of histories, relationships, and ephemeral gestures preserved in material form. Each sculpture represents a tree, cut and shaped differently, reflecting both individuality and shared vulnerability. This project emerged through a collaborative investigation with my students, aged 14 to 18, who engaged in the process of gathering and recording pictograms found in forest environments. These collected visual traces—marks of presence, play, or ritual—became the starting point for translating memory into ceramic form. By transforming these ephemeral forest signs into lasting sculptural objects, the work questions how memory, promise, and belonging can be materialized. The installation invites viewers to wander through a symbolic landscape, where absence is made tangible, and where the dialogue between nature, community, and memory resonates as both fragile and enduring.
Installation overview at Art Fair NAP + Netherlands, Amsterdam (2025) with Josilda da Conceição Gallery.
Choppromises — burnt ceramic sculptures in various sizes, 2025.
Choppromises I, (2025) Burnt ceramic sculpture 35 × 20 × 30 cm
Choppromises III, (2025) Burnt ceramic, 50 x 40 x 40 cm
private collection
My research focuses on how narrative strategies can be transformed into collective designs through processes of arrangement and facilitation of encounters. Within this framework, I investigate the ways in which collective meaning-making emerges when individuals engage in shared acts of storytelling, memory-work, and material experimentation.
Nature plays a central role in this exploration, not only as a physical environment but as a vital component of identity that allows us to reflect upon transformation, continuity, and rupture. It becomes a site where personal and collective experiences of change are inscribed, negotiated, and reimagined.
As an artist, I seek to understand how belonging can be constructed through processes of displacement, affection, and the exchange of promises. These dynamics are not fixed but constantly shifting, shaped by the interplay between lived experiences, symbolic gestures, and cultural rituals. By examining these collective practices, my work aims to articulate how art can serve as a space for reconfiguring relationships between identity, tradition, and the environments we inhabit.
Astrophilia I, (2024), 26 x 26 x 4 cm, burnt pencil drawing on glazed ceramic
Astrophilia II, (2024), 26 x 26 x 4 cm, burnt pencil drawing on glazed ceramic
Works presented with a group show at Capital C during Amsterdam Art Week 2025 (Amsterdam, NL) with Josilda da Conceição Gallery.
Astrophilia is a research-based artwork that unfolds as a meditation on the secret correspondences between trees, stars, and time itself. It listens to the silent language of growth rings and constellations, revealing a hidden symbiosis in which the cosmos and the earth are not separate realms but mirrors of one another. The work treats trees as living archives—rooted in soil yet attuned to celestial rhythms—embodying a form of wisdom that surpasses human measure. Their cycles of blossoming, decay, and renewal echo the breathing of the universe, inscribing time in ways both intimate and infinite. Astrophilia weaves together these terrestrial and celestial rhythms, creating a space of contemplation where earthly organisms and stellar bodies appear as co-authors of existence. It asks: What does it mean to live within these cycles, rather than apart from them? How might the subtle synchrony of stars and trees teach us to reimagine our relationship to the fragile ecologies of the planet? The piece is less an object than a portal—an invocation of cosmic memory and earthly devotion. It calls upon viewers to attune themselves to the hidden pulse of the natural world, suggesting that within these rhythms lie the keys to transforming not only our ecological awareness, but our collective imagination of care, survival, and renewa