My installations begin with a simple premise—thread attached to a set of frames that sit on a wall. From a distance, it looks like a weaving or a painting, but step closer and you become aware of the air between the threads and the thin acrylic edges holding them in place. The frame almost disappears into the wall behind while the thread is stretched across the middle, hanging in space.

The installation is constructed on site using a modular system I designed. Slender lengths of clear acrylic—usually cut to set dimensions of 25, 50, or 100 centimetres, or tailored to a specific space—are fitted with evenly spaced cylindrical pegs. Arranged to form the perimeter of the work and fixed directly to the wall, these components create the frame. The pegs act like the posts of a loom, holding the thread in place.

The thread—cotton, linen, or occasionally metallic—is wound around the pegs in layered sequences, running horizontally, vertically or diagonally to build a type of warp and weft. I introduce colour through a layering process, where colour is built slowly through the interaction with different threads as well as the background shade of the supporting wall. Each layer follows a specific order determined in advance. Using six layers in total (generally three horizonal and three vertical), a composition emerges.

Because there is no backing to the work, the thread floats in space between the frame edges, producing a surface that is precise, permeable and vibrating. Light passes through the gaps, casting shadows that move across the wall as the day shifts. As the source of the room’s light changes, so does the appearance of the work. The threads catch a stray angle of sunlight and appear to briefly oscillate before returning to stillness. As day turns to evening, different colours begin to emerge and recede. The appearance also changes with the position of the viewer: from a side angle the threads appear solid and opaque, while from afar they seem to dissolve into the wall behind. The installation interacts directly with its environment—the threads hover dynamically in relation to the light and the viewer.

The modularity of the system allows it to adapt to almost any wall size or proportion. The frame components can be reconfigured and re-used in future works. But once installed, the work is inseparable from its site: the only points of contact are the frame edges, and there is nothing holding the structure together once those edges are removed. Once that location is no longer available the work falls apart. In this sense, the installation is the opposite of an autonomous independent object. It is inextricably tied to its context.

From Limitation to Play

Early on, I wondered how the physical work might continue to exist once removed from its location. Could it be relocated whole? Could it be preserved, or made archival? Various practical solutions were suggested—building it onto panels, creating a secondary support, encasing it in a clear box—but ultimately, I felt like this would irrevocably compromise its spirit. These pieces are meant to feel psychologically and physically light, ethereal, barely there, mysterious and fleeting. The work started to assume in my mind something of a spiritual nature. With an acknowledgement of its lightness and aliveness, I was forced to engage with it differently. Invoking notions of impermanence and non-attachment, resurrection and the potential for a holographic type of duplication, I started to see the made installation as a single stage in a life cycle which stretched out in both directions from a particular instance of threads on a wall hanging in space.

Once I started to see the work as dynamic rather than static, as existing through time and space rather than at a specific fixed point, my thinking opened to what the work might want to be. A breakthrough came after grappling with the fact of the installation’s immovability: this constraint around durability made me seriously consider the idea of impermanence. I realised that the modularity of the framing system, along with the mathematical structure of the grid, make each work reducible to a defined set of parameters: measurements, placement of the frame strips, the order and layering of colours. Therefore, even before anything is put on a wall, the work can take form as a set of written instructions. With this backwards move from the material to the conceptual, I saw that if permanence in physical form was difficult to sustain due to space constraints, endurance could arise with the possibility of remaking the work using the same set of rules, thus allowing it to reappear in new contexts. I started to see the work as existing first as an idea, and then as a physical form.

From there, the practice expanded to become one of conceiving, making and unmaking, and remaking. These installations cannot stay still: the work wants to shape-shift, disappear, reappear, transform. In allowing the practice to be as expansive as possible, I was forced to develop an attitude of non-attachment. This psychological acceptance of the work’s inherent changeability could only happen when I located its anchor in the world of ideas.

The fact that art can exist only or primarily as a concept is uncontroversial in the art world today.¹ In addition to conceptual art theories, my practice sits within a tradition of games and play. In his 1938 book, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga defines play as a voluntary activity, bounded in time and space, and governed by rules that are freely accepted but that must be observed for the game to function.² Playing a game is an act set apart from ordinary life, with its own order and temporality. Huizinga emphasises that play is not aimless—it is purposeful within its own field of activity—and its value lies in the experience rather than in producing a fixed, final object. Crucially, the boundaries and rules that constrain play are the very conditions that make it possible. Remove the rules, and the play dissolves into formlessness.

Following along these lines, the Oulipo (standing for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), a literary collective founded in France in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, explicitly used rules to generate new art forms. Mathematical rules and literary constraints are no doubt limiting, but for Queneau and Le Lionnais, they were crucial to moving art forward.³ Jacques Roubaud describes the reasoning behind the need for constraints as follows,

‘Asserting one’s freedom’ in art makes sense only referentially—it is an act of destroying traditional artistic methods. After these crises of freedom—they are often creative and enriching in their opposition to the fossilised relics of tradition—it finds sustenance only in a parrot-like repetition of the original gesture, a self-parody that immediately becomes irrelevant.⁴

The word ‘constraint’ is usually interpreted as a negative, as a rule limiting possible actions. But the Oulipo used constraints to ‘extend their artistic possibilities, not just to pull off extraordinary verbal stunts’, and indeed they are taken seriously by literary critics because of their sense of delight and play.⁵ Andrew Hugill claims that the group is essentially ludic in nature rather than mathematical, and that success lies in delivering an elegant and witty text regardless of how stringent the rules are.⁶ For him, the tension between the aesthetic surface and the compositional challenges results in some truly sublime art.⁷

In my work, I use rules and boundaries to define what can and can’t happen within a given frame. In accordance with Huizinga’s ideas, I make up a game that I play with myself, using my available environment. Like the Oulipo, I have not found the rules to be limiting. In fact, by being explicit about what must or must not occur, I have simultaneously become aware of the spaces of freedom or of how much possibility lies within those boundaries. Paradoxically, the limitations have expanded my perception to see previously assumed limitations as just that—assumed and not necessary. Below, I discuss two projects, Presidio Heights House (2023) and Seasonal Weaving x BTWNLNS (2023– ), each of which has a different set of constraints, allowing for a different space of possibilities. Each project has expanded in unexpected ways, assuming a unique life trajectory.

Presidio Heights House: Iteration and Multiplicity

In the project Presidio Heights House (2023), I devised a set of rules that specify the colours, proportions, and layering order of an installation. Notice that although being rigid on colour ordering and column and row equality, there is no insistence on the size or proportionality of the resultant grid. The grid’s dimensions depend on the ‘available space’, but what this space entails remains open. In fact, under the rules of this game, there could be multiple available spaces. Paying attention to what is non-negotiable pushes me to see where my degrees of freedom are, to determine what is the space of play within these strict rules.

The first iteration of this work lives in a private home in the Presidio Heights neighbourhood of San Francisco. The work is installed onto a wall in the dining area, sitting with the owner’s furniture and art. This piece was initially made for this space, and is intended to integrate into the architecture, as if it had always been there. It was this space that gave rise to the above set of rules.

The second iteration was installed for a solo exhibition at Knulp gallery in Sydney. Here, the wall was both wider and taller than in the original San Francisco installation, allowing the composition to expand in two directions. The third iteration moved off the space of the wall onto a stretched linen canvas. The shift to a fixed support altered the character of the piece: instead of being tied to its environment, it became a portable object. Relative to the other two, this composition is flattened and compressed, and the sense of the grid floating in space is replaced by a more intimate surface.

The rules are written allowing the work to multiply. While the San Francisco installation was the ‘original’, the two successive pieces are not copies. Both have their own unique existence—distinct in character from the others—but clearly in accordance with the underlying rules. The hologram is a useful metaphor here. In a holographic image, each fragment contains the entire image, albeit at a reduced scale. In my installations, each iteration contains the full composition—all the relationships defined by the instructions—but manifests them differently according to site, scale, and support.

Each of these works are like a performance of the same score—the differences lying not in what was ‘played’ but in the conditions of performance. Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work sharpens this understanding. In his 1962 essay The Poetics of the Open Work, Eco distinguishes between works that are ‘closed’—fixed in form and meaning—and those that remain ‘open’ to multiple realisations.⁷ In the open work, the artist establishes a structure that guides but does not dictate the outcome; performers or interpreters complete the work in each realisation. Openness is not chaos—the framework is deliberate, and the range of possible variations is intentionally bounded.

Presidio Heights House operates in this way. The instructions fix the essential parameters—the sequence of colours, the structure of the grid—but within them, each iteration responds to its surroundings. All three pieces reference the rules directly and indirectly of each other. The work exists both as the total field of possible realisations and as the individual, time-bound versions. Its identity is not singular but cumulative, accruing meaning through multiplicity.

Seasonal Weaving x BTWNLNS: Time as a Variable

Presidio Heights House fixes the instructions for an installation but allows the space of that manifested work to multiply. In contrast, my ongoing collaboration with Between Lines, called Seasonal Weaving x BTWNLNS (2023–), fixes the location while requiring the composition or instructions to evolve. The rules of this project are: 1) for modular frames to be permanently installed on one wall of the space, and 2) that twice a year, around the equinoxes, the existing installation is removed, and a new one is made in its place. The requirement of regular clearing and renewal introduces time as a key element in the work.

Between Lines is a design, furniture, and bookstore in Sydney; its displays, objects, and arrangements change frequently. The rules are composed so that the installation evolves in harmony with both the internal and external environment—with the temperature and movement of the seasons, as well as the objects and colours in the room.

Because the frames remain in place, the collaboration unfolds cumulatively, its full character only becoming apparent to myself and a viewer over an extended duration. Each new composition is influenced by the one that came before, the goal being each time to create something new. The constraint pushes me creatively in both my desire to avoid predictability or repetition, and to make something beautiful and resonant. Over time, I have found myself paying deeper attention to subtler variations in colour sequence, density, and proportion, as well as the nuances of the space and the changing seasonal light conditions.

The Work as a Life Cycle

The collaboration with Between Lines explicitly embraces the fact that a single iteration has a given (limited) duration. Like how the words ‘available space’ led me to the possibility of a multiplicity of spaces, the requirement to create something ‘new’ draws my attention to the old installation and what is to become of it? This question has given rise to a new game for myself –can I transform a process of destruction into something generative? Can I give the old a new life, a new form?

What has emerged is a type of performance practice that I call ‘unpainting’, where I record myself taking down the installation using video. Like its construction, the deconstruction process is caring and deliberate, but with a degree of unpredictability. Some threads slip out smoothly; others snag or form knots, forcing a pause to adjust and coax them free. Once the tension is gone, gravity takes over, pulling each line down in uneven arcs and loose curves. There is a particular beauty in this collapse—a structure that took days to build unravels in minutes, becoming something softer and less certain. The deconstruction with its loss of control is the shadow side of the earlier meticulous rule following. Simultaneously a relief and a psychological exercise in letting go, it’s not destruction for its own sake, but a deliberate clearing, allowing for something new to emerge.

Finally, in my desire to wring out all creative possibilities, the removed thread is not discarded but used to make other works. These works feel like a final resting place for each iteration of this seasonal installation. They function simultaneously as artefacts as well as artworks in their own right. Rather than the holographic-like simultaneity of a single work existing in different places, this installation is more like a tree—a single work growing and being pruned over time, with branches and off-shoots. While the space continues to be available, the work is never truly settled but remains in a constant state of growth and evolution.

Conclusion

This installation practice doesn’t fit easily into existing art world and art market institutions. The made work only exists in relation to its context. Sometimes (as in Presidio Heights House), it can have multiple iterations, undercutting ideas of uniqueness and ownership. Sometimes (as in Seasonal Weaving x BTWNLNS) it can’t be properly appreciated in a single viewing, instead requiring multiple viewings over a period of years. The work resists categorisation, transforming from a set of written instructions to thread hovering off a wall, to a video work, to an art object. It shape-shifts and moves, multiplies and disappears. What is of greatest interest to me is how a simple set of parameters—a grid, thread, frames, a wall—can open so many new creative possibilities.