Tessera
Tessera is Latin for a single piece of mosaic, the small cube from which an image is assembled. In these heads the classical bust is overtaken, partway across, by such cubes: the face continued in units, as if rebuilt from its own fragments.
The motif of the classical head dissolving into pixels is familiar from digital art, where it usually stands for loss or error. Here the cubes are not a glitch but a building method. The face is not breaking down; it is being laid.
The bronzes do not exist. They are images of sculptures that could be cast: volume, joint and patina decided, no metal poured. For centuries a bronze existed first as a model, a drawing, a promise to the foundry. But that model was a physical thing, with weight, made by a hand that would answer for it. A generated image promises a cast without having met any resistance at all.
Tessera holds this gap open rather than covering it. The works are shown as what they are: proposals. Whether one of them is ever cast, and what would change if it were, belongs to the work.
The same principle, turned toward the wall.
A group of light reliefs extends the series. Each begins as a classical head in profile or three-quarter view and is overtaken by the grid partway across the slab.
They are intended to be cast in Jesmonite, a mineral composite that takes on the surface of stone without ever having been quarried. Realised, they would look carved and be cast: a stone surface that is itself a copy, made from an image. The material would carry the question of the whole presentation.
In raking light every set-back cube becomes a shadow. The dissolution of the face is drawn by what falls across the surface, not by the surface itself.
Slicing Series
Before Tessera, the route from digital model to bronze had already been taken. For the Slicing Series, begun in 2014, I model a form digitally, cut it into slices of 3 mm cardboard, assemble them by hand and cast the result in bronze. The cardboard original does not survive the casting.
The layering is not a surface effect but the trace of how the work was made: the digital section, turned into material one slice at a time. Entangled Hands (2018) was cast in an edition of five, received the A' Design Award in Silver and was shown at theBlanc Gallery, New York, in 2026.
