This drawing is inspired by Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa and the Yin-Yang symbol.

Waves can be described as foldings of a surface. The flat plane responds to a force, and by doing so, it is engraved with information. We perceive a wave as travelling towards the shore, but the water doesn’t move with it. Like when a crowd performs a wave motion by standing up and sitting down in an organised way, it is only the information (standing or sitting) that travels.

Language is the organisation of matter, and by reacting to its immediate environment, it transmits and traverse space independently, seemingly like an entity on its own. Physics teaches us that a wave of light might collapse into a particle depending on the measures of observation. But it also tells us that matter itself is nothing but contained energy. Everything can burn and transform. Language and matter are indistinguishably intertwined, yet undeniably separate.

Presentation video | Work in progress video

In these works, I use loops of rubber hose to create imprints in moist filler. The loops are pressed into the surface of the panel and held in place by a raised edge surrounding the format.

The elasticity of the rubber introduces a tension into the forms. When I use rubber hose as a drawing tool, I see it as a metaphor for language. Language, too, is elastic. Words and images influence and distort one another depending on how they are arranged. A sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table mean something different together than they do in any other context.

The elasticity of language also creates tension—something that can be experienced as either beauty or discomfort. Yet we tend to assume that, after being stretched or bent, language returns to a natural or ideal state. Psychoanalytic theory might describe this belief as belonging to the Imaginary register.

We need language to be elastic because language is inseparable from life. Its resilience lies in the ability to maintain a coherent form while adjusting to the environment. Without this elasticity, both language and life would be far more vulnerable to the entropy of the world.

Res Ipsa is a compilation of works made by an act shaping the filler once it is prepared inside the frame. The works thus function as a recording device and give a statement of the event taking place while the filler was still wet.

Res Ipsa is Latin for "the thing itself" and is part of the juridical term "Res ipsa loquitur" (the thing speaks for itself), used when an injury or accident in itself clearly shows who is responsible, such as an instrument left inside a body after surgery.