Textile works

Blue (Version II) continues the inquiry of Blue (Version I) and Dust, and brings its two registers into a single body: the cosmological and the intimate. On one side stands Everett’s many-worlds interpretation — reality as a branching field in which every choice splits the self into parallel, mutually invisible versions. On the other, the most private of experiences: the quiet grief and tenderness toward the people we almost became.

The work insists that these are not two subjects but one. What physics describes as superposition, the body knows as longing; what cosmology calls the collapse of probability, intimacy calls a life. Neither language is sufficient alone — the equation cannot hold the warmth, the confession cannot hold the structure.

The upper part of the work holds a multitude of faces, none of them fully visible — each is veiled by a layer of interference, a flickering static stitched in metallic thread. They are parallel versions of the same self, coexisting in superposition: as long as no choice is made, no face can come into focus.

Below them, a landscape — or perhaps a city — begins to take shape. This is where probability collapses into matter: paths, slopes, branching red lines like capillaries of the realised world. What was indistinct above becomes terrain below.

Between the two zones runs the quiet drama of the work: every actualised landscape is built at the cost of all the faces that remained unfocused. The embroidered line acts here as a measuring instrument — it does not depict, it registers, the way a seismograph registers a tremor.

This work approaches identity as something porous and reversible rather than fixed. Instead of a clear sequence of cause and effect, it imagines the self as a zone of fluctuation, where several potential directions remain active at once. Choice does not erase alternatives; it only pushes them out of sight.

The figure here is not doubled, but internally unsettled. Its transparency suggests a body that has not fully agreed with itself — a form still negotiating its own outline. What appears as absence is not loss, but latency: a state of waiting, of unfinished articulation. The body carries traces of other lives it almost entered, as if they were stored in its skin.

The stitched marks do not describe anatomy. They behave more like residues of motion — hesitant gestures, interrupted trajectories, thoughts that turned back on themselves. These lines imply that becoming is never smooth. It is marked by pauses, corrections, and small acts of resistance against a single, coherent narrative.

The eye does not belong to the figure. It floats as an impersonal observer, registering the instability of the scene. It is less a symbol of consciousness than a sign of exposure — the feeling of being seen while still in the process of forming. Under this gaze, identity remains provisional, open-ended, and slightly vulnerable.

The work holds onto that fragile interval: the moment when the self has not yet settled, when multiple versions still overlap, and the future has not fully committed to one shape.

In this work I think of reality as a field of overlapping probabilities rather than a single continuous line. Every decision creates a subtle fork: one version of me steps in one direction, another slips into a different branch and disappears from the visible scene. We usually continue as if only one path exists, yet the sense of “what could have been” keeps vibrating somewhere at the back of consciousness.

The two figures belong to this split moment. They are not two separate people, but two neighbouring selves generated by the same choice: the one who steps into the chosen trajectory and the one who turns away and remains unrealised. One body exists on the surface of the work, in the “present tense”; the other is buried underneath, like an afterimage or an echo. For me this layering is important: it suggests that discarded versions of ourselves never vanish completely – they remain stitched into the underside of our lives, affecting how we move through the world even when we cannot see them.

The eye introduces a third position: the witnessing gaze that observes this constant branching. It is neither fully internal nor fully external; it looks at my own becoming almost as if it belonged to another intelligence, one that can hold several timelines at once. Under this gaze, identity is no longer a stable core but a sequence of provisional states, each one slightly different from the previous. The work lives inside that threshold, where yesterday’s self, today’s self, and the unrealised double coexist for a brief moment before drifting apart.

This textile-based spatial installation invites visitors to traverse a soft labyrinth — not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spatial metaphor for the human condition of temporal dislocation. Liminality is not a transitional phase to be overcome, but a continuous state we inhabit — the space between identities, between gestures, between then and not-yet. Echoing Victor Turner’s writings on liminality and Merleau-Ponty’s view of the body as both subject and surface, I map this fragile in-betweenness through environments that are felt as much as they are seen.

The labyrinth in The Minute of Now is not linear. It is soft, slow, and intentionally disorienting. Its folds and veils evoke the texture of thought, of hesitation, of a consciousness that does not quite know where it is headed. In this way, the labyrinth becomes a cartography of modern anxiety — a visual and tactile rendering of how we move through life constantly trying to escape the discomfort of the present. We distract ourselves with futures, romanticize pasts, or flee into performance and productivity, never quite arriving where we are.

At the center of the labyrinth is not an answer, but a pause. Here, the viewer becomes the work. They are invited to sit and to remain — still for one minute. In this minor ritual, presence becomes performative. Time becomes visible. The gesture — minimal and intimate — offers no spectacle, only a confrontation with what remains when movement stops. This act of “being-with-time” echoes my larger artistic practice, which often lingers at the seams of transformation — in stitched silhouettes, layered collages, and installations that trace the invisible structures of memory and change. In The Minute of Now, the material logic of the work becomes spatial and participatory. Fabric, as always in my work, holds both symbolic and sensual charge: soft yet structuring, permeable yet containing, it defines the path while allowing light and air to pass through.

Ultimately, this installation does not guide the viewer toward revelation but gently redirects them back to themselves. It asks a difficult question: Can you bear to be exactly where you are? In a world addicted to acceleration, The Minute of Now offers a fleeting refuge — and perhaps, a quiet kind of courage.

A line is stitched across it like a horizon: the left side is anchored by real dried flowers, faded and brittle, echoes of memory. On the right, embroidered blossoms bloom in thread, fragile symbols of imagined futures. But at the center, where your eye is drawn — there is nothing. A space left deliberately empty. This is where the present should be. But it is not.

We are always in motion — linguistically, mentally, emotionally. In most Indo-European languages, time is rendered spatially: the future lies “ahead,” the past “behind.” As cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown, we live by metaphors — and our primary metaphors of time are rooted in direction, distance, and linearity. We march toward goals, leave things behind, look back, move forward. But where, then, is here?

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky expands this idea across cultures, revealing that not all peoples conceptualize time in the same way. Some Aboriginal languages in Australia, for example, don’t use “left” or “right” but cardinal directions — and for them, time may move from east to west, not front to back. These linguistic frameworks shape perception — and trap us, too. For many of us, the present becomes an impossible location: invisible, unnameable, and uninhabited.

The central empty space in this work becomes a metaphor for this philosophical paradox. The “now” is always slipping away — not because it’s truly absent, but because we are never there to meet it. As Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists describe, lived experience is never pure presence; it is layered with memory and anticipation, shaped by a body moving through a world it does not entirely possess.

This piece also draws from the concept of liminality, introduced by anthropologist Victor Turner — the in-between phase of rites of passage, where identity dissolves before being reformed. We live much of our lives in such liminal states: not quite who we were, not yet who we will become. But modern life has no rituals to hold us in this space. We resist the in-between. We race through it. We treat the now not as sacred but as a corridor — a passage to something more defined.

“Lost & Found” is an art installation that transforms the ephemeral into a profound philosophical reflection. Crafted from fallen tree bark, the work symbolizes the delicate fragility of nature, its transient beauty captured in the organic material. Upon these natural fragments, fabric and embroidered messages in three languages express a universal sense of unity, transcending cultural and linguistic boundaries.

This fusion of organic and human-made materials highlights the cyclical nature of existence: what is ‘lost’ in one form is ‘found’ in another. The act of returning these bark fragments to their source, the trees, serves as a poignant acknowledgment of our interconnectedness with the world around us. The work invites viewers to contemplate their role within this intricate web of life and nature’s resilience.

“Lost & Found” prompts introspection on the interplay between humanity and the natural world, reminding us that in the midst of loss and change, there is always the potential for renewal. Through this delicate balance of fragility and strength, the installation offers a quiet but powerful reflection on how connection and transformation can be discovered in the most unexpected places.

Numbers — a numerological reading of the phrase of Joséphin Péladan, a magician, literary scholar and proto-curator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who argued a lot about the decline of civilization, the catastrophic consequences of the First World War and political pressures.

Nous ne croyons ni au progrès ni au salut — we believe neither in progress nor in salvation.

Lilies are placed on the surface, a peculiar reference to Oscar Wilde’s portrayal of Péladan. The lily, on the one hand, symbolizes purity and innocence: the early Christians believed that the lily sprouted from the tears of Eve as she was leaving paradise. The second meaning of the lily is death. At the end of the installation, the lilies wilted.