Estúdio de Escultura 2025-26 • Projeto do 2.º Semestre
1. Title:
Project 1 Title: Still Warm
Carbon steel, stainless steel, aged zinc-coated steel mesh, plaster, concrete, resin, epoxy, polyurethane foam, pigment, iron oxide, aggregate
47 x 40 x 50cm, 38 x 38 x 34cm, 27 x 25 x 23 cm
2026
Caption: On the weight of sustained presence
Project 2 Title: What the Æther Holds
Caption: A kinetic meditation on breath, scent, and the invisible work of nurturing
2. Keywords:
Still Warm
Accumulation
Body
Deformation
Cellular
Geological
Pregnancy
What the Æther Holds
Ephemeral
Kinetic
Atmosphere
Impermanence
3. Description:
Still Warm
Materials: Carbon steel, stainless steel, aged zinc-coated steel mesh, plaster, concrete, resin, epoxy, polyurethane foam, pigment, iron oxide, aggregate
Still Warm examines the accumulated body of the mother and the worker, built upon rather than idealized. Three misshapen orbs reveal surfaces worked through layers of epoxy, resin, concrete, plaster, pigment, and broken material. The skins are excessive, cellular, viral, geological.
The title holds dual meaning: warmth as what caregiving provides without accounting, and "still" as both temporal endurance and resistance past depletion.
The orb is the organizing logic of the work. Stripped of face, orientation, and hierarchy, the sphere offers no single correct reading. But these are not perfect spheres; they are deformed, patched, irregular. The gap between the implied whole form and the ruptured surface that has grown over it is where the work's argument lives. The idealized body and the accumulated reality of inhabiting one are held in the same object.
What the Æther Holds
Materials: stainless steel wire, XPS foam, plywood, preserved moss, ultrasonic fog system, foam, essential oils, bubble solution, Arduino-controlled mechanics
What the Æther Holds is a meditation on impermanence, on feminine labor that is seen and unseen, on the poetry of capturing air. It is fog given form, breath made visible, and the invisible held just long enough to know it was there.
What the Æther Holds is a kinetic sculpture that makes the intangible momentarily tangible. Six wire frames emerge from a moss landscape, each capturing fog inside translucent soap bubbles shaped like mushroom clusters. The bubbles ascend slowly, carrying visible mist within their delicate film, releasing the aroma of the forest floor when they pop and dissolve back into the air.
This work exists at the intersection of containment and release. The æther, the ancient fifth element, the substance of breath and atmosphere, is briefly held, made visible, and given form. But holding it is temporary. Each bubble is an act of gentle futility: we shape the formless, contain the uncontainable, and then let go.
4. Research Questions
Overarching Research Question
How can sculpture make visible the invisible economies of feminine labor (the sustained, unaccounted work of caring, holding, and maintaining) and what material and formal strategies best carry that inquiry?
Sub-questions across all of my projects:
What is the relationship between material weight and the experience of emotional burden?
How does scale affect the bodily experience of encountering labor made visible?
Can ephemeral and permanent materials function as opposite expressions of the same underlying condition?
What does it mean for feminist inquiry when the research methodology is the making?
Still Warm:
Within the overarching inquiry, this project investigates feminine labor through accumulation and surface, labor that leaves excess traces, builds up, and does not dissolve.
How can metal armature and mesh be formed into volumetric bodies that support accumulated surface weight while retaining organic irregularity and imply bodies that have been added to, and show it?
• Which joining and bracing techniques allow structural stability without rigidity of form?
• How does mesh tension affect the final silhouette, and can deformation be deliberately introduced at the armature stage?
How does the sequential layering of epoxy, resin, concrete, and aggregate produce surfaces that read as biological rather than constructed, enacting the way labor accumulates on and transforms the body over time?
• What layering sequences and cure intervals produce eruptive, cellular texture?
• At what stage should aggregate be embedded to appear grown-in rather than applied?
How does the contrast between matte concrete and pooling high-gloss resin produce tension between the geological and the biological?
• How does finish variation function as a compositional tool across multiple volumes that must read simultaneously as distinct bodies and as a collective?
What palette relationships across substrates allow each volume to read as individual while belonging to a group?
• How does the finish variation map onto three distinct states of the laboring body (accumulating, eruptive, depleted)?
What the Æther Holds:
Within the overarching inquiry, this project investigates feminine labor through disappearance and atmosphere, the labor that leaves no trace.
How can sequential electronic choreography (timing, rhythm, staggered release) produce an experience of presence and disappearance, enacting the rhythm of care given and withdrawn?
• What timing intervals create rhythm rather than mechanical repetition?
• How does staggered release across six stations affect perception of individual versus collective presence?
How does the physical behavior of soap film and fog (surface tension, membrane formation, controlled lifespan) function as a material metaphor for the temporary and unacknowledged nature of emotional labor?
• What solution compositions produce the most stable fog-filled membrane?
• How does controlling the moment of rupture affect the emotional reading of the work?
How can functional infrastructure disappear inside aesthetic form, and what does that concealment mean in a work about invisible work?
• What fabrication methods allow channels and mechanics to be fully absorbed into the landscape?
• Does visible infrastructure undermine or reinforce the conceptual argument?
How does the life cycle of scent mirror the experience of care itself: present, transforming, and eventually gone, but lodged somewhere in the body's memory?
• Which scent compounds most reliably trigger involuntary memory response?
• How does concentration affect the transition from presence to trace and can that threshold be controlled?
5. Theoretical Context
Still Warm builds on feminist sculpture's long engagement with the body as material site, in conversation with Lynda Benglis, whose poured and congealed forms collapsed the boundary between making and bodily excess, and Lee Bul, whose grotesque hybrid figures challenge idealized femininity through surface and accumulation. The work engages contemporary discourse around emotional labor and invisible domestic work, particularly the writing of Arlie Hochschild and Sara Ahmed on the affective economies that structure caregiving, asking what it looks like to give that labor physical form: not metaphorically, but materially, as texture, as crust, as weight.
Still Warm is an evolving body of work. The current iteration of three misshapen steel and mesh volumes encrusted with epoxy, resin, concrete, and aggregate is understood as a first generation of forms. Future development will expand the work in scale and material range, introducing ceramics and additional metal fabrication techniques to deepen the investigation into accumulation, surface, and the laboring body. The work grows as the inquiry grows.
What the Æther Holds explores what cannot be held: breath, scent, the quality of air after someone leaves. Mushroom-clustered bubbles rise from a mossy landscape filled with scented mist, lasting 15–30 seconds before releasing the fragrance of damp earth and forest floor back into the air. The work investigates feminine labor, specifically the sustained, unaccounted work of holding: nurturing, containing, eventually letting go. Drawing on Griselda Pollock's theorization of the aesthetic as a space of transformational encounter, the piece locates its tension between what is temporarily present and what has already begun to disappear.
6. Process and Documentation
Still Warm is currently in active fabrication. The first phase of the work focused on armature construction: forming and welding galvanized steel, stainless steel, and metal mesh into three volumetric bodies of varying scale. Each form is built to be structurally capable of supporting heavy layered surface treatments while retaining the organic irregularity that is central to the work's argument.
Surface development proceeded through material experimentation: testing layering sequences, cure intervals, and the behavior of embedded aggregate across epoxy, resin, concrete, plaster, and paint. The investigation seeks textures that read as biological and accumulative, as cellular, eruptive, grown rather than applied, with unexpected contrasts between matte concrete and pooling high-gloss resin, producing tension between the geological and the organic.
Color and finish developed across the three volumes as a compositional tool, allowing each body to carry its own material history while functioning as part of a collective. Finish variation maps onto the work's conceptual logic: three bodies, three states, one shared condition.
Documentation of material tests, fabrication process, and surface development is ongoing. Future phases will expand the work into larger scale and introduce ceramics and additional metal fabrication, extending the investigation into how accumulated material can carry the weight of accumulated labor.
7. References
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Benglis, Lynda. Adhesive Products. 1971. Poured latex. Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Bul, Lee. Cyborg series. 1997–2011. Mixed media sculptures. Various collections.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Mendieta, Ana. Silueta Series. 1973–1980. Earth-body works documented in photographs. Estate of Ana Mendieta and Galerie Lelong & Co., New York.
Nakaya, Fujiko. Fog Sculpture #47258 "F.O.G." 1982. Live fog installation. Various exhibitions internationally.
Pak, Sheung Chuen. Breathing in a House. 2006. Installation with video, 6 min. 22 sec. Performed and documented in Busan, Korea. Displayed: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum 2F Exhibition Gallery, February 2–18, 2024.
Pollock, Griselda. After-affects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.