When my artistic work took a new direction during my master's studies, I began approaching clay as a co-creator rather than a material to control. I wanted to understand what happens when I let go.
Instar became a work about collapse and transformation, where cracks were no longer mistakes but potential.

The word instar, borrowed from Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, describes the stage between moults, like when a caterpillar prepares to become something else. A skin is left behind, something new takes shape, not yet complete. This state of transition also mirrors the human experience of change, our inner shifts, often marked by ritual acts, where we slowly leave something behind and step into a new state, where we are no longer quite the same in the next stage.

I built the sculpture by coiling the clay with my eyes closed, slowly. Cracks appear, the clay buckles. Inside me, resistance is stirred, a desire to mend, to straighten, to save. But I let it be. Instar is a self-portrait, not of how I look, but of how I exist in motion, in resistance, in hesitation. It shows the moment I try to release control, but still hold on. A portrait of my inner work, my moulting.

At the same time, the work is larger than myself. In an adjacent room, a 3D printer constructs supports in neon-orange bioplastic, precise and industrial, also created through coiling. They signal both rescue and threat, a colour of warning. Their presence raises questions: How much control does our time demand? What happens when we let technology carry what can no longer hold?

Here, two worlds meet, the organic and the artificial, the present and the absent. I am there, with clay in my hands. The machine moves without me, follows a blueprint. In that gap, something familiar arises: the fragmentation of our time. The longing for control. The fear of collapse.

Instar is therefore also a portrait of our time, a time in transformation. We are between layers of skin, between who we once were and who we have not yet become. As individuals, as a society. The cracks are not weaknesses; they carry the story forward. They show that something has been released, that we are moulting, even if it hurts.

Is the collapse near?
Has it already happened, and are we doing everything we can to control what can no longer be held up?