Coarse of Life, 2023
Description :
Coarse of Life draws from the moonga (red coral) stone I wear as a personal means of managing anger and emotional intensity. I recreate the stone in soap, a material associated with cleansing and purification, but give its surface the coarse texture and visual weight of concrete. This contradiction between appearance and material becomes central to the work: what appears hard, permanent, and resistant is actually fragile, soluble, and capable of gradually disappearing. The work reflects on anger in a similar way, as something that can feel solid and deeply embedded but can also be softened, controlled, and transformed over time. Through the tension between the stone’s symbolic protection, soap’s capacity to cleanse, and concrete’s suggestion of hardness, Coarse of Life considers emotional restraint not as the elimination of difficult feelings, but as an ongoing process of learning how to live with and reshape them.
