Hotel Kalahari
Wire installation
190 cm x 190 cm x 70 cm
Artist’s Statement
Hotel Kalahari is an immersive wire installation that explores themes of community, care, and resilience through materials, light, and shadow, as well as transparency and volume. Inspired by the architecture of the sociable weavers’ vast communal structures in the arid Kalahari, the work gestures toward nests as temporary yet caring communal shelters in a harsh environment. I aim to initiate a dialogue about how we inhabit and share space, and how art can serve as a heterotopic space for care, resilience, and reimagining. Like Ruth Asawa, I view material and form as a means to express the time I live in, where fragility and resilience are intricately entwined.
The work was first installed in a barn and has been conceived with adaptability in mind, responding to new sites and audiences. Working through repetitive actions such as looping and coiling, I align it with a kind of embodied drawing in space. It evolved into a meditation on repair and relational entanglement, emerging from a personal reckoning with grief and transformation. The act of weaving wire is also profoundly personal — a way of processing the loss of my youngest son to depression, an illness that reflects the deep vulnerabilities of our time. The wire nest invite viewers to reflect on the delicate balance between protection and confinement, belonging and displacement.
The installation comprises a woven wire nest (27 kg) and smaller breeding chambers within. As light interacts with these forms, they cast dynamic shadows that become integral to the work, echoing its central dualities of fragility and strength, grief and regeneration. Changing light (over a day) inside the gallery will give the experience of the passage of time.
The work invites viewers to reflect on how we build, inhabit, and sustain spaces — together.