CRITICAL REFLECTION



1. Introduction

As the only member of my immediate family living aboard, my practice has been shaped by a personal exploration of what it means to be at home; how home is felt, remembered, or carried across time and space.

Throughout the course, I developed a practice that balances introspection with contextual awareness, combining reflections on lived experience with a material and process-driven studio and workshop experimentation. A theory informed curiosity guided this development, situating my work within broader sculptural and conceptual contexts. To support this, I developed a structured writing method, integrating creative and academic reflection through close reading, analysis, and response with how past and present artists have engaged with related concerns. This critical engagement allowed me to discover ideas and vocabulary, which I was able to internalise and weave into my practice.

In my critical reflections, I examine the work of selected artists, including their theoretical perspectives to reflect on how they informed and expanded my research, practice and its future direction. I discuss three major investigations: first, sculpture in the expanded field, which I explored through bodily-proximate materials, breath as sculpture, and installation as a processual and performative field; second, the domestic as a setting for art, examined through personal-relational experiences as sculpture and the reimagining of domestic and utilitarian objects as extensions of the body; and third, home as a living organism, considered through cyclical temporality and material memory of the body. These lenses through which one can view sculpture, personified through my practice, continues to evolve, engaging with body, material, memory, and space, exploring transformation, cyclical processes, and the relational qualities of lived experience.

I also briefly consider how engaging in a range of professional pursuits helped me articulate my research and test how it might translate across exhibition, education, and collaborative contexts. Finally, I consider the near future of my practice, particularly in relation to the upcoming Research Festival and the transition from academic study to professional work.



2. Sculpture in an Expanded Field

2.1. Bodily-proximate materials

Here, I examine how sculpture can operate within an expanded field of relations between body, material, memory and site, reflecting on how artists like Anselm Kiefer and my practice use bodily-proximate materials to explore how sculpture can be experienced and inhabited.

Krauss’s essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1979) provides a framework for understanding how contemporary sculpture moves beyond traditional objecthood to operate within a network of relations between architecture, landscape, and site, where context, placement, and interaction are integral to meaning. In this schema, sculpture is no longer confined to form and material alone, it also engages site, spatial relationships, and conceptual concerns.

Anselm Kiefer’s Under the Lime Tree – On the Heather (2019), merges landscape, painting, the body and memory, through its material and gestural language. Layers of charred straw built into the painted surface give the work a sculptural dimension, where straw suggests the body’s nearness through matter, gesture, and process. Tied to agricultural labour, domestic life, and survival, the straw becomes a residue of human activity; a ghost of the body embedded in tactile material memory. The work reads as part painting, part ruin, part memorial, a tactile site of material memory that extends beyond the pictorial image.

Building on this engagement with materials that suggest the nearness of the body through association or direct linkeage, in the House is the Body, the Body is my Home (2025), I extend this exploration through both direct and metaphorical means. I work with human hair, satin ribbons, caraway seeds, materials drawn directly from the proximity of the body. Alongside these, I use materials that relate to the body in a more metaphorical sense, alluding to the performance of bodily functions such as sight (represented by glass in my work), or archiving its traces (with clay mirroring this function in a similar way to the bones in one’s body). Glass, white stoneware clay, cotton paper, rusted mild-steel, charred pine and horse hair merge fragmented reflections of landscape, body, material, and memory into an expanded field of relational and embodied experience. Glass, like the windows on my childhood home, performs an ocular function, mediating between self and cosmos. Clay, preserves a biological memory of the land, akin to bones retaining traces of lived experience. Cotton paper, like my skin, absorbs the marks and reflections of the environment, while charred pine carries the memory of my home, preserving its physical and emotional traces through scent, domestic usage and atmosphere created by pine forests in my locality. Through these materials and spatial relationships, the work explores how sculpture can be experienced and inhabited.



Fig.1: Anselm Kiefer, Under the Lime Tree – On the Heather, 2019. Emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, straw, clay, and charcoal on canvas. 280 x 760 cm. Installation view at White Cube London.

Fig.2: Rita Veres, the House is the Body, the Body is my Home, 2025. Charred pine, rusted mild-steel, castor wheels, carraway seeds, human hair, Transylvanian horsehair, red-satin ribbons, etched glass, silk-paj, hard-ground etching embossments on soft-white cotton paper. Dimensions variable



2.2. Breath as Sculpture

Here, I consider how sculpture may extend beyond the visual through scent, exploring breath as a medium for relational and cyclical exchanges between the body and the atmosphere.

Giuseppe Penone’s Breath of Leaves (1979), composed of boxwood leaves gathered from the mountainous landscape of the artist’s birthplace frame breathing as spatial and sculptural phenomena, dissolving boundaries between body, Nature and sculpture in cyclical and lyrical rhythms. Arranged in a floor-based installation, it reveals both a trace of a human figure and the outline of a magnified leaf emerging from the pile, positioning breath as both intimate and cosmic, linking body and atmosphere. Trees breathe in what we breath out, and we breathe in what they release. This reciprocity gestures toward an arboreal* temporality, an ongoing cycle of interconnection between the body and the land.

Building on the idea of breath as a medium for connection, Delcy Morelo’s Madre (2025), an immersive installation weaving clay, water, soil, straw, hay, cinnamon, cloves, buckwheat, chia seeds, and honey, embodies the maternal qualities of the Earth as both a source of life and a place of return (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,2025). Its dark, fragrant, womb-like form radiates warmth, scent, and earthy density, engaging the senses beyond the visual. The smell of clove and cinnamon, envelops my body, stirring visceral memories of my childhood and home, reinforcing breath as a conduit between body, memory and environment.

In the House is the Body, the Body is my Home (2025), I explore the entanglements of home, body and land through the scent of caraway seeds and charred pine, materials that engage through their olfactory and tactile qualities. They interweave breath, memory, and domesticity, creating a dialogue between interior and landscape, where breath becomes an invisible link binding home, body and nature. The work situates breath as a sculptural medium for relation and renewal, extending sculpture beyond the visual.



Fig.3: Giuseppe Penone, Breath of Leaves, 1979. Boxwood leaves. Dimensions variable. Installation view at Serpentine South, London, 2025.

Fig.4: Delcy Morelos, Madre, 2025. Clay, soil, straw, hay, cinnamon, cloves, buckwheat, chia seeds, honey. Installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Photographs by the author.

Fig.5-6: Rita Veres, the House is the Body, the Body is my Home, 2025. Installation view at MA Graduate Show, Camberwell.

*Arboreal time ‘in tandem with the turn of seasons, or the ebb and flow of the moon, is cyclical, lyrical, perennial; both past and future exists within this present moment. It thus draws circles within circles, like the rings one finds inside of a tree’ (Shafak, 2025).



2.3. Installation as processual and performative field.

Here, I explore installation as a processual and performative field, examining how gesture, residue, and temporal suspension situate sculpture as a lived and evolving encounter shaped through duration and sensory perception.

In Otobong Nkanga’s Confluence – Afterglow (2024), flame-licked ceramic towers of stacked, crackle-glazed cylinders punctuate the gallery like scorched tree-trunks, accompanied by bowls of wood ash invoking terrains both scorched and restorative. The work conjures the residue of energetic traces, like fire, left behind after interaction, suggesting duration, transformation, and decay. I am drawn to how Nkanga positions materials and orchestrates their spatial relations to create a charged atmosphere of suspension: a time held still between burning, cooling, energy and exhaustion. The installation invites the viewer into this temporal threshold, where movement through the space feels physical and contemplative, oscillating between destruction and renewal. The work constructs an existential encounter with matter, time, and presence. It reconfigures space and sensory perception, situating installation as a field of lived duration, where ecological, material, and human energies momentarily hold each other in balance.

Building on these ideas of gesture, residue and temporal suspension, my work engages installation as a processual and performative field, where time, form, space and viewer remain in continual negotiation. I used the corner as a site of convergence to reconfigure the cubic architecture into a spatial threshold prompting bodily movement and shifting perception. Elements within the work: an unfinished ceramic weave held in suspension, a hair piece positioned on the verge of disappearance, operated as gestures of pause and transience, holding time materially without resolution. Their precarious placement foregrounded the relational dynamics between time, object, site, and viewer, framing installation as an active encounter expanding beyond the fixed display. A subsequent iteration of the etched glass weave for Overlay further tested how repetition, scale, and recontextualization transform perception, reinforcing my understanding of installation as an evolving dialogue between site, body, material, and temporality.




Fig. 7: Otobong Nkanga, Confluence - Afterglow, 2024. Ceramic, wood ash. 153 x 200 x 200 cm. Installation view at Lisson Gallery London.

Fig.8-9: Rita Veres, the House is the Body, the Body is my Home, 2025. Installation view at MA Graduate Show, Camberwell.

Fig.10: Rita Veres, the House is the Body, the Body is my Home (ii), 2025. Charred pine, Transylvanian horsehair, red-satin ribbons, etched glass, Dimensions variable. Installation at Arts SU Gallery, Camberwell.



3. The Domestic as Setting for Art

3.1. The Personal-Relational as Sculpture

Here, I investigate how personal gestures of care between parent and child might be translated into sculptural form, exploring personal-relational experiences as sculpture, where memory, body, material, and ritual-like gestures converge.

Musteata (2017), discusses Womanhouse (1972) staged in a seventy-five-years-old residence at 533 Mariposa Street, as a simultaneously social sculpture, performance, site-specific installation, and artist-curated exhibition, positioning the home as an active setting for art. As Musteata (2017) notes ‘personal content was prioritised over formalist concerns, situating the exhibition outside the framework of an institution and inside of a home.’ I am drawn to how, Womanhouse championed inclusion of lived experience within fine art contexts, examining the relationship between material, content, and curatorial placement in relation to the domestic. Judy Chicago’s Menstruation bathroom (1972) transformed a household bathroom into an installation filled with tampons and other hygiene products, confronting the stigma surrounding menstruation. For me, Womanhouse expanded the boundaries of what an art material is, opening a dialogue between artistic inquiry and lived experience.

In a sculpturally introspective way, Henry Moore’s Sheep Piece (1971-72), translates the intimacy and relational dynamics of the domestic into monumental form. Sited in the sheep yard of his estate, the work consists of two rounded biomorphic forms positioned in close proximity, leaning gently toward one another. According to Henry Moore Studios & Gardens (2025), Moore’s enduring interest in the mother-and-child theme emerged from his exploration of interdependence between two forms: one larger, one smaller. The work functions as an extension of the home and the human body, encompassing nurture, protection, and belonging, where each form sustains the other in balance and purpose.

In my practice, this idea of interdependence resonates through personal recollections of family life, particularly my relationship with my Mother, whose care and tenderness are formative forces in my work. In the House is the Body, the Body is my Home (2025), etched glass is interwoven with braided horsehair and satin ribbons, recalling her hand braiding my hair. Through this repeated, meditative gesture, I reflect on reciprocity between parent and child, balancing, sheltering, and shaping one another. The connected yet fragile materials embody this bond, translating personal memory into sculptural form and situating my practice within an expanded field where, body, memory, material, and personal-relational experiences intertwine.



Fig.11: Judy Chicago, Menstruation Bathroom, 1972. Shelf stacked with Tampax, Kotex and other hygienic products, red satin tampons, trash bin, Installation view at Womanhouse, 1972.

Fig.12: Henry Moore, Sheep Piece, 1971-72, Bronze edition of 3+1, 570 x 627 cm. Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, Hertfordshire, UK. Photo by the author.

Fig.13: Rita Veres, the House is the Body, the Body is my Home, 2025. Installation view at MA Graduate Show, Camberwell.



3.2. Domestic and Utilitarian Objects as Extensions of the Body

Here, I examine how domestic and utilitarian objects can be reimagined as extensions of the body: sites where material, memory, and mobility converge, and how artists such as Doris Salcedo, Mona Hatoum and Olivia Bax activate these objects through intervention, tension and movement, concepts that have informed and expanded my practice.

Doris Salcedo’s Unland: the orphan’s tunic (1997), composed of mismatched table halves of varying height, threaded by delicate human hair and raw silk, transforms domestic furniture into vessels of memory, rupture, and continuity. I am drawn to how, through artistic intervention, the tables shift from inanimate furniture into fragile, almost-animate forms that appear to breathe and continue to grow. For me, the domestic object stands in for the human body, not through depiction, but through traces of touch, material, and presence, where the tables become a body, sutured, mended, and held in tension.

Similarly, in Mona Hatoum’s Remains of the Day 2016-18, burnt fragments of furniture, barely held together with wire mesh, reconfigure once-familiar forms into fragile, sculptural vessels of memory, loss, and displacement. I am drawn to how, through material treatment, Hatoum imbues domestic furniture with bodily tension and psychological presence.

In a different but resonant way, dolly rolls into 218, an exhibition text by Olivia Bax, reflects on how functional objects such as wheels can activate sculpture through their potential for movement. In Hopper (2020), half a dozen castor wheels, fixed beneath a steel frame unsettle its function, transforming the object into a choreography of imagined shifts, rolls, and repositions. For me, the wheels charge the sculpture with latent energy, producing a perceptual tension between stillness and motion.

Across these explorations, I became interested in how domestic and utilitarian objects can be reimagined as extensions of the body. In my work, I reimagine a domestic table as a stand-in for the human body, embodying its structural capacities for movement, support, and adaptation. Constructed from charred pine and rusted mild-steel, the work draws together strength and fragility: mild-steel reflects the body’s endurance and eventual decay, while pine carries the scent and memory of my childhood home. The table’s collapsible and mobile form, supported by castor wheels, transforms a familiar domestic object into a sculptural body-in-waiting, capable of holding presence-in-absence, and a perceptual tension between stillness and motion.




Fig.14: Doris Salcedo, Unland: the orphan’s tunic, 1997. Wooden tables, silk, human hair and thread. 80 x 245 x 98 cm. Installation view. Photo by Perez Art Museum Miami.

Fig.15: Mona Hatoum, Remains of the Day, 2016-18. Wire mesh and wood. Dimensions variable. Installation view at Barbican London, 2025.

Fig. 16: Olivia Bax, Hopper, 2020. Steel, chicken wire, newspaper, glue, paint, plaster, castor wheels, varnish. 112 x 96 x 96 cm. Standpoint Gallery, London. Photo: Tim Bowditch.




Fig.17-18: Rita Veres, the House is the Body, the Body is my Home, 2025. Charred pine, rusted mild-steel, castor wheels. Installation view at MA Graduate Show, Camberwell.



4. Home as Living Organism

Here, I consider cyclical temporality and material memory of the body to explore how home might be experienced as a living organism in perpetual recurrence, renewal and transformation. By examining precedents in Arte Povera and contemporary sculpture, I trace how material and form can embody time, memory and spatial relations.

Meyer-Stoll’s essay, On the Phenomenon of Time in Arte Povera** , explores time across multiple registers: cyclical and perennial, measured and experienced, embodied and personal. Meyer-Stoll (2013) highlights how Arte Povera artists sought to engage with the mystery of time by interweaving philosophical, sociological, biological, and cosmic perspectives with their direct, lived experience of it. In this framework, time is not a neutral backdrop but vessel for matter and energy, a receptacle for movement in perpetual transformation.

According to Meyer-Stoll (2013) Penone’s Albero di 2,30 metri (1976), for example, carved from a fir tree, exposes layers of growth, making time tangible through material revelation. I am drawn to, how Penone’s gesture of carving into the tree’s interior to reveal its former self becomes an act of temporal excavation, uncovering what was, within what remains. For me, the sculpture enacts a cyclical temporality that turns, returns, and reflects, where memory, growth, and decay are continuous and intertwined.

This notion of cyclical time, of continuous becoming, finds resonance in Mona Hatoum’s Recollection (1995), where the interplay of material and form articulates time, space and body as interwoven, shifting, and perpetually renewing. Dispersed across the gallery space, strands of Hatoum’s hair, rolled between her fingers into delicate, gossamer-webbed spheres, collected over years, gather in corners and on the windowsill. I am drawn to how the fragile threads accumulated and reshaped, embody cyclical rhythms of shedding and renewal, linking the intimate temporality of the body to the cosmic continuity of the Earth’s turning. For me, the work transforms hair, a trace of the body and a marker of time, into a sculptural meditation on the cyclicality of recurrence and transformation.

In smaller circles, larger circles (i) (2025), I continue this exploration by shaping hair into springs. Hair, as a material that stores memory, carrying traces of the body and the passage of time. Each coil storing movement and potential energy, embodying experiences compressed and ready to unfold. The springs become vessels of matter and memory, where the body, like Penone’s tree, hold time within itself. Placed in dialogue with a seat made of charred pine and rusted mild steel, set on wheels, the work reflects how home, as a living organism, possesses the capacity to shift, morph, and transcend, carrying its own traces in matter and memory. Ultimately, my interest lies in how these material explorations might evolve beyond the braids and weaves.




Fig.19: Giuseppe Penone, Albero di 2,30 metri (Cod 0298), 1976. Fir tree. 230 x 15 x 19 cm. Photo: Archivio Penone.

Fig. 20: Mona Hatoum, Recollection, 1995. Human hair. Dimensions variable. Installation view Beguinage St. Elisabeth, Kortrijk. Photo: Fotostudio Eshof, Courtesy of the Artist.

Fig. 21: Rita Veres, smaller circles (i), larger circles, 2025. Collection of own hair, horsehair, hairspray, rusted mild steel, castor wheels, charred pine wood. Dimensions variable.

**Arte Povera: ‘was a radical Italian art movement from the late 1960s to 1970s whose artists explored a range of unconventional processes and non-traditional ‘everyday’ materials’ (Tate, 2025). They expanded the field of painting, sculpture, drawing, performance, and photography, often moving from one medium and technique to another without concern for a ‘signature style’ spearheading what later became known as installation art (Christov-Bakargiev, C. and Celant, G. ,2002)


5. Looking Forward...

5.1. Reflections on Professional Pursuits

Engaging in a range of professional pursuits throughout Unit 3, has helped me articulate my research and test how it might translate across exhibition, education and collaborative contexts.

Delivering an Artist Talk at Flow, a group exhibition at Millbank Tower, helped me articulate my research beyond exhibition format and strengthen my public speaking and presentation skills. Participation in the Berlin Summer School challenged and expanded my understanding of material dialogues; prompting reflection on how site and circumstance might shape future works. Co-organising Overlay at Arts SU Gallery, a self-initiated group exhibition by our MA Sculpture cohort, deepened my curatorial and spatial awareness, collaborative decision-making and practical abilities in exhibition design, budgeting, logistics, promotion, and hosting a private viewing. Delivering an MA Perspectives Talk on Material and Meaning to BA Sculpture students at Middlesex University consolidated my approach to making and reaffirmed the value of sharing research through dialogue as well as exhibitions. Finally, a Residency at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens offered hands-on experience in workshop facilitation, and collaboration, preparing me for future educational and public projects such as the upcoming Research Festival. Detailed reflections on these experiences are included in Additional Research – Professional Experiences.



5.2. Research Festival and Beyond

For the Research Festival, I proposed a workshop titled ‘Writing as Sculptural Gesture’, exploring how critical and reflective thinking transforms into form and material presence, within sculpture. Using close reading and writing as generative tools, the workshop will encourage participants to translate thought into creative process. I aim to reflect on circularity within my practice, how engagement with other artists informs my sculptures, and to test whether my research method can be adapted and carried within other’s practices. This aligns with my intention to further develop and share my methods through future workshops. More information on session plan and resources in Practice – Research Festival.

Additionally, to help sustain my practice beyond my MA, I began outlining a project proposal for Mead Fellowship Awards 2026, which opens for applications in December 2025. If successful, this opportunity will help me gain hands-on experience in exhibition and public programme design, two elemental parts of my future plans.







BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barbican (2025) Giacometti x Mona Hatoum: Encounters [Exhibition]. Barbican 3 September 2025 – 11 January 2026. Available at: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/encounters-giacometti-x-mona-hatoum?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22832296027&gbraid=0AAAAA95n_66ItWEUNqzRVjOEtET1TuYle&gclid=
CjwKCAjwxrLHBhA2EiwAu9EdM7vSLUeqcD1bx62vgbmYrD0F0TdaYdbztQxF8ftH6VrJG8UkOAiNRBoCYGIQAvD_BwE (Accessed: 24 September 2025).

Bax, O. (2024) Floss at Holtermann Fine Art, London, 20 January – 16 March 2024 [Exhibition text]. Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59de67d849fc2b6bb04a258a/t/658438f6eb979c105c2847f3/1703164151443/HFA_Olivia+Bax_
Floss_Exhibition+Text.pdf (Accessed: 25 May 2025).

Bell, K. (2008) ‘A Mapping of Mona Hatoum’ in Mona Hatoum: Unhomely. Berlin: Holzwarth Publication, pp. 61 – 73.

Christov-Bakargiev, C. and Celant, G. (2002) Arte Povera: Art from Italy 1967-2002. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, pp. 11 – 16.

Henry Moore Studios & Gardens (2025) Encounters, Ware, Hertfordshire [Exhibition Handbook]. London: Henry Moore Foundation.

Krauss, R. (1979) ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ in October (8), pp. 31 – 44. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/778224

Meyer-Stoll, C. (2013) ‘On the Phenomenon of time in Arte Povera. A descriptive approach on the basis of selected works in B. Mendes-Burgi (ed.) Arte Povera: The Great Awakening. Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, pp. 19 – 31.

Musteata, N. (2017) ‘Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and the CalArts Feminist Art Program, Womanhouse, 1972’ in E. Filipovic (ed.) The artist as curator: an anthology. London, Koenig Books Publishing, pp. 109 – 120.

Nkanga, O. (2024) We Come from Fire and Return to Fire [Exhibition]. Lisson Gallery, London. 24 May – 3 August 2024. Available at: https://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/otobong-nkanga (Accessed: 3 June 2025).

Penone, G. (2025) ‘The Ritual of Gathered Air’ in Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in Roots. London: Serpentine, pp. 56 – 59.

Penone, G. (2025) Thoughts in the Roots [Exhibition]. Serpentine South Gallery, London. 3 April – 7 September 2025. Available at: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/giuseppe-penone-thoughts-in-the-roots/ (Accessed: 27 July 2025).

Shafak, E. (2025) ‘Feel the Forest Breathing’ in Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in Roots. London: Serpentine, pp. 60 – 62.

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (2025), Delcy Morelos: Madre, 2025. Available at: https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/delcy-morelos/ (Accessed: 17 August 2025).

Tate (2025) Art Now: Doris Salcedo, Unland. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/art-now-doris-salcedo (Accessed: 5 September 2025).

Tate (2025) Arte Povera. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/arte-povera (Accessed: 17 July 2025).

White Cube (2025), Anselm Kiefer [Exhibition]. White Cube, London. 25 June – 16 August 2025. Available at: https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/anselm-kiefer-masons-yard-2025 (Accessed: 10 September 2025).