systemic names both the subject and the method of this work. In ecology, the term describes an intervention that moves invisibly through a network until it permeates the whole — as in systemic pesticides that seep into the roots and rise into every leaf. In culture, it signals the hidden structures, habits, and logics that reproduce themselves until they feel inevitable. In my practice, systemic is the acknowledgement that contamination and care, refuge and refusal, are never separate states but different expressions of the same entangled system.

Wax is my primary medium because it behaves like the systems I am tracing: mercurial, connective, unstable. It moves between solid and liquid, repelling and absorbing, sealing and suffocating. It connects plant, animal, human, and petrochemical; it holds the warmth of touch even as it entombs. In this exhibition, wax clings to chicken-wire mesh, forms thick skins, saturates fibres into biomorphic forms, and accretes over engraved panels. A sumptuous material that contradicts the acrid veneer of the poisoned root and limp stem. The sculptural matter in the room builds slowly, piece by piece, into an ecology of surfaces — an accumulation that mirrors the sedimentation of contaminants in soil or the gradual enmeshment of species and systems.

The paintings work in counterpoint to the sculptures. Where the sculptures are dense and fibrous, the paintings offer surfaces for absorption — porous, receptive, yet equally marked by layering and seepage. Together they form a feedback loop: the sculptures are the physical accretions of a contaminated world, the paintings the psychic and sensory residues of living within it.

My wider philosophy of art-making is grounded in this attention to porous boundaries and constitutive impurity. I work against the fantasy of purity — in materials, in ecosystems, in histories — because purity is always an act of exclusion, and exclusion is always violent. I am drawn instead to hybrid forms, to the messy negotiations where care and harm blur, where preservation requires change, and where refusal can be a form of refuge.

systemic is not an accusation nor a cure. It is a mapping of the ways we are bound into the systems we inhabit, the ways those systems live inside us, and the unstable beauty that emerges when boundaries fail.