introduction
Vortex draws from Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, reinterpreting its enduring symbolism of impermanence and human fragility. While Hokusai's wave situates the individual against the vastness of nature, this work turns the gaze inward, toward the emotional currents that shape and unmake the self. The wave becomes a metaphor for internal motion, tracing the ebb and surge of transformation that follows grief. Within the philosophy of The Law of Inner Alchemy, it speaks to the inevitability of change: how inner worlds, like tides, are reshaped by unseen forces.
reflection
Sonder, understood as the recognition that every other life contains an interiority as dense, pressured, and reconfiguring as one’s own, offers a way to situate what I call The Law of Inner Alchemy. This law proposes that the principles which govern physical matter also govern psychic life: every external force reorganises what lies within. When a force acts upon a body in physics, deformation occurs; the structure yields, redistributes, and settles into a new configuration. Grief functions as its emotional analogue. It presses, fractures, and rearranges the internal geometry of the self so that no subject returns to a prior state, only to a differently calibrated equilibrium.
Sonder extends this from the singular to the collective. The transformations I trace are not unique to one narrative but are constantly unfolding across countless, unseen interiors. Every stranger is a site where pressure, implosion, and slow reconstitution are underway, whether or not they are spoken of. Loss becomes an architectural event, an ongoing experiment in form shared by all bodies.
The sculptures materialise this inner alchemy. Leather here has been treated as a proxy for skin and memory, subjected to stretching, compression, burning, and imprinting until it carries the residue of impact. Each marked surface is intended to represent a diagram of forces that could be applied to any body, anywhere.
As the viewer lingers before the work, grief appears as a shared, unseen morphology, an inner alchemy quietly redrawing the secret map of every parallel life, including their own.
