Human,
Approximate
Human, Approximate, 2025
Human, Approximate is a series of sculptural figures constructed from black garbage bags and cardboard boxes, materials associated with packing, transporting, storing, and discarding.
The works resemble bodies that have been wrapped, stacked, or left waiting in transit. Some sit, some slump, some lean against one another, their human forms visible but partially obscured. The figures appear present and physical, yet anonymous and sealed, as if their identities have been flattened into the surfaces of packaging.
These are not arbitrary materials. Garbage bags and cardboard boxes form the backdrop of ordinary working life: warehouses, back rooms, service entrances, and end-of-shift clean-ups. They belong to the infrastructure of a society that depends on certain kinds of labour while remaining largely indifferent to the people performing it. The figures do not announce their exhaustion. They simply embody it, the way a body does after years of being useful and unremarked upon.
The works occupy an uneasy space between person and object, reflecting how human lives can be repositioned within economic and political systems: valued for output, managed for efficiency, sorted through categories, and cycled through with the logic of inventory. In this way, the sculptures speak both to working-class experience and to migration, to lives shaped by labour, transit, waiting, and conditional belonging.
Their surfaces suggest replaceability, disposability, and temporary use. Their postures suggest something more enduring: vulnerability, exhaustion, and dignity. What remains visible is not identity in any fixed sense, but the trace of human presence under conditions that continually threaten to flatten it.
Human, Approximate asks what happens when a human life becomes something approximate: a statistic, a package in transit, a temporary presence awaiting approval. Suspended between visibility and disappearance, the works reflect on how fragile the category of the human can become within structures organised around storage, movement, and efficiency, and how such conditions can quietly shape a person’s psychological and emotional life.