Born 1986, Jawa Timur, East Java
Lives and works in Jogjakarta, Indonesia

Artist Statement

My works questions contemporary notions of the environment as something separate from mankind. People today tend to regard nature and the environment as a commodity to be exploited for financial gain, which differs vastly from the relationship between primitive man and the natural world. Nature was once believed to have a spirit, an entity and strength worthy of respect. This is particularly inherent in Indonesian culture, where Animism predates other religions by centuries and remains as part of daily traditional practices and beliefs.

I am primarily concerned with the ongoing human interference with natural balances and resources, without prescience.  My intention is to draw awareness to the potential impacts of the biopolitical intersections between man and environment, the neglected, the overlooked and the unintentional outcomes of this dysfunctional relationship. My objects and creatures are personal, sprung from an imagined future, a new hybridity between matter both living and inanimate.

In deconstructing and recombining the various media and materials I use, I consider them from various points of view, both in function and embodied meaning, as well as the origin and identity of each material. In gaining an understanding of these components, I aim to first reach a point where I am fully aware of the new entity that I am creating, I imagine a kind of territory or base where the art is able to be part of an ecosystem that always has a relationship between humans and the environment.

Some of my strange manifestations at first resemble animals or plants, skulls, skeletons or other naturally occurring fragments. On closer inspection, the works seem creepily monstrous, perhaps odd or abnormal. They appear simultaneously alluring and repulsive.  Such is the result of cause and effect, the correlation between humans and the environment, where not all outcomes are necessarily negative. Scientific breakthroughs, medical advancements and other interferences may result in unwanted, symptomatic outcomes such as global warming or genetic alterations in living things, many of which are caused by human activities, triggered by the imbalance of nature itself.

 My artistic discourse is a question that I offer to myself as well as to the wider community. I am aware that my work cannot provide solutions to the current global environmental predicament. I only hope that my work may give an appreciation and reason to question the natural world with a greater sense of wonder.