SYMBIOTE NO. 2
2026
Sculpture
W : 100 / H : 300 mm
Birch / Black Cotton Fabric
Whenever I face the forests of Finland, I feel a strange sense of compassion. A fleeting two-month summer, a piercing darkness, and a frozen earth reigning for over six months. Through a human lens, they appear as beings suffering in extreme deprivation.
Yet is that merely our arrogant gaze? That brutal environment is not a hardship, but the rigorous standard of survival and the genetic code of evolution they have adapted over millennia. Trees clutching the frozen earth, lowering their metabolic rates through months of pitch-black, snow-buried winters. To human eyes they may look fragile, but upon closer inspection, they are the most perfectly systemized "survival machines" imaginable. The density and brutal materiality forged within their growth rings are something soft-climate trees could never replicate.
The Trichome series stems from the wildness of an ecosystem that mutates grotesquely, as if relishing its own harshness. Fabric trichomes erupting through the hardened bark to harvest ambient moisture and nutrients. In the cold air of the Helsinki studio, I reassemble the outer shells of these repressed organisms. It is a raw act of survival and a material collision that shatters the sanitized illusion of domesticated nature.