Cyphers, 2024

Installation: hand-sawed patinated copper, hand-cut paper, ballpoint pen on paper, plywood

Winner of the Kudos Emerging Artist Award, Sydney, 2024

Finalist in the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, Paddington, 2024

First exhibited at Airspace Projects in A Message to the Future, a Note from the Past, 2024, alongside Jess Montecinos’ Wiphala, Diablada - Read the accompanying essay, ‘Obscured by Darkness, Revealed by Light,’ by Rose Dolenec Hannan

Exhibited as Dormant Codes at Luna Studio, Newtown, in Torsion, 2024, a group show curated by Yazmeen Meedin

Abstract marks, like undeciphered writing systems, seem charged with the potential for meaning; but this meaning is dormant, illegible, and inaccessible. Cyphers is an installation that considers language as something that requires human interaction, and a community of people using the language, in order to keep it alive— or bring it to life.

Exhibited across multiple iterations, this work combines paper-cutting, ballpoint pen drawing, and hand-sawed copper to create a hypothetical encounter with a fictional, indecipherable script. By inviting audiences to use speculative copper cyphers to decode a series of paper-cut drawings, Cyphers explores the communicative potential of abstract marks when they are framed - or misread - as carriers of hidden meaning. The work prompts consideration into the moment a drawing transitions into writing, and asks whether collaborative efforts to decipher, decode, and misread meaningless marks can contribute to the illusion of legibility.