GRAB IT WITH BOTH HANDS
Acompaning Artwork, Grab it with both Hands, 2025
As an artist, I’ve often thought of my waste moulds as artworks in their own right.
They carry negative space and have fragile skin that remembers every touch and imperfection. But they cannot be ART (or can they?), their purpose is practical. They exist only to hold, protect, and then die. They are built to disintegrate so that the sculpture may come into being.
There is a quiet dignity in their function, an unspoken understanding that creation often demands destruction.
Before destroying my most recent mould, I decided to scan it. A small act, but one that changes its story. The scan freezes the object in a state it was never meant to occupy: permanence. The digital version hovers in a weightless world, unchanging, while the physical one, dusty, brittle, real, awaits its end.
What holds more value, the tangible object or its digital trace?
The mould’s body is heavy with process, yet temporary. The scan is eternal, yet hollow.
Philosopher Bernard Stiegler once described technology as a form of tertiary memory, an extension of ourselves that helps us remember, but also threatens to remember for us. Perhaps the scan’s stillness makes it more archive than artefact, more document than experience.
This tension between what endures and what disappears sits at the heart of how we understand value. We preserve things because we fear loss, yet it is the fleeting that gives life its weight.
Is meaning assigned only because we know there is an end? Maybe that’s why humans cling so tightly to memory, to legacy, to the idea of being remembered. The fragility of life is what makes it feel purposeful.
Recently, The Telegraph published an article about a woman who made a digital clone of her dying husband. Her project, much like mine in the studio, wrestles with the same subjects: the wish to capture what is erased. I recall the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” (first aired on February 11, 2013), where a grieving woman resurrects her partner through his social-media data. Both the real story and the fiction suggest that technology can recreate presence, but not being. They give us voices, gestures, likenesses, yet something vital remains missing: the ability to change, to decay, to end.
And perhaps this desire to resist change extends far beyond the digital dead. We live in a time increasingly obsessed with holding back the visible signs of life’s passing. The visual culture of today is one of smoothness and suspension, faces unlined, bodies unaged, skin fixed in a perpetual present. Cosmetic technologies, biohacking, and the emerging cult of longevity all speak to a growing wish not simply to live longer, but to avoid death entirely. It is as if, in our pursuit of permanence, we are sculpting ourselves into stillness, editing decay out of the image of the human. Yet in doing so, we risk erasing the very traces that make us alive.
The beauty of the mould lies in that very truth. Its worth is not in what it becomes, but in the fact that it existed only for a moment, a necessary, vanishing stage in the act of creation.
Maybe that’s the quiet lesson buried in all of this: that what makes something valuable is not that it lasts forever, but that it doesn’t.