Trading tradition, 2025
Steel
70 cm x 44 cm x 30 cm
Artist’s Statement
Trading tradition is a sculpted metal worker’s jacket. Bent, cut, ground, welded and polished, it forms a steel shell of a garment once meant for labour. Its structure is assembled from scrap offcuts – each piece a fragment of another life – coming together like a puzzle shaped by lineage.
The work draws from a family history of blue-collar labour, and the shifting trajectory of the artist’s life away from it. The contrast between rusted textures and polished steel mirrors this duality: the grit of inherited skill alongside the sheen of new opportunity. It speaks to pride, but also to the complicated feeling of becoming polished from someone else’s hard work – of standing tall in a life made possible by another’s strain.
Two metal tablets sit in the jacket’s front pockets. One honours the past while the other speaks toward the future. Their inscriptions – rendered in a coded, atypographic script – hold private promises and recognitions. Viewers are invited to handle, read and decode them, implicating themselves in the act of translation between an interpersonal and generational relationship.
From the clean fold of the collar to the worn, rusted spine, the piece acknowledges both inheritance and divergence. It holds the labour of those who came before, while recognising the shift from work done out of necessity to work made in pursuit of expression. It is an offering of gratitude – an admission that the artist’s hands are shaped by the hands that came before them.
Image Gallery
