Biomaterial Practice
Gelatin is the core material in my sculpture practice. It is a biological agrifood by-product made from collagen, used across food, medicine, film, ballistics, and scientific research. I hand-bloom, cast, mould, carve, and dry each sculpture in my small rental kitchen.
I treat gelatin as a semi-sentient collaborator, beginning as animal matter, then shifting into a fragile dust, bloomed to liquid and an eventual ‘sculptural organism’. Its responses to climate, microbes, and touch mirror the disabled body’s negotiations with environment and care. Its behaviour becomes a form of speculative biology, blurring material, survival, and agency.
The work is grounded in interdependence and the environmental precarity that defines immunocompromised survival, a cybernetic exchange in which material, climate, microbes, and care infrastructures are mutually shaping. My practice uses non-glycerin techniques so the gelatin remains a bio-polymer rather than a glycerin based bioplastic. Glycerin methods are regarded as “embalmed” or “domesticated,” no longer responsive, ecological, or capable of microbial interaction. This self-taught methodology utilizes gelatin as a responsive biomaterial, preserving environmental feedback, microbial dialogue, and ecological agency.
The sculptures rely on clean air, stable temperature, water, electricity, and periods of rest, echoing the same conditions required to sustain the disabled body that makes them. Its behaviour mirrors the precarity of living beings and other vulnerable ecologies, turning conditions of survival into a live sculptural system. This environmental responsiveness makes the sculptures function like living entities within institutional space.
Through ecological and durational performance, it modulates, melts, crinkles or collapses as it interacts with climate, spores, bacteria, and ambient biological forces.
Without care and environmental stability; bodies, plants, animals, and infrastructures all convey how systems fail under neglect, and how care can reveal or even reverse their degeneration.
My relationship with gelatin began in childhood in the early 1990s, when it functioned as an accessible kitchen-based nutritive material in the management of digestive and inflammatory illness. Years later, this early familiarity evolved into a biomaterial sculptural practice, with my first decomposing live gelatin sculpture exhibited in 2018.
While some sculptures remain fragile or site-responsive, others produced within laboratory-style controlled conditions last much longer, spanning several years of inter-continental travel. Microbial degradation is designed as a controlled possibility rather than an inevitability. This longevity depends on the goal and the specific modalities required for each intended outcome.
The gelatin functions as a material analogue for access-as-system philosophy. Through it the work becomes an ongoing study of how human and ecological care navigate the ethics of sentient maintenance, vulnerability and biocitizenship.
Each work acts as a stand-in for disabled and fragile entities, within each gallery and museum that maintains it. The sculptures becomes living petri dishes, recording the interdependence between material, health, and environment, turning the conditions of survival into the sculptural process itself.
Surface study: material as metabolism.
Image Courtesy of Kings Leap Gallery, 2020 [Mycoplasma Altar, post mandated quarantine]
One-quarter of the Mycoplasma Altar sculpture was intentionally produced using unsanitized methods to enable controlled, non-pathogenic microbial degradation during exhibition.
Microbial behaviour reflects the production approach: sanitized workflows prevent it, while unsanitized workflows activate intentional, non-pathogenic degradation. Commissions may request either method depending on the desired outcome.
Degradation can be intentional depending on conceptual contect but is not inevitable - under standard gallery conditions the sculptures remain non-pathogenic and fully reversible.
Institutions vary in their approaches. Some have developed exemplary, forward-thinking support, tracking environmental control as part of the artistic collaboration and enabling pristine works to remain stable for years, even during inter-continental travel.
The work’s intention and production both articulate an institutional critique of care and labour, grounding its inquiry into maintenance, access, and shared responsibility.
Commissions may select either modality - stable or degradative - depending on the conceptual direction of the exhibition. In all cases, material behaviour is intentional, non-pathogenic under gallery conditions, and fully reversible.
[ for more in-depth writing about my biomaterial practice, please reach out]
↳ see additional biomaterial sculpture exhibitions