State of Becoming

State of Becoming developed through the artist's prolonged engagement with clay, bodily repetition, meditation, and processes of material transformation. Centred on repetitive actions of crushing, dissolving, reclaiming, and reworking clay by hand, the performance gradually transforms physical labour into a reflection on impermanence, self-realisation, and continual becoming. Rather than treating destruction as failure, the work approaches collapse as part of an ongoing cycle through which forms are broken down, absorbed, and reconfigured over time.

The work evolved alongside the artist's sculptural and installation practice, particularly experiments involving dissolving clay structures and reclaimed material. Through repeated handling, fragmentation, and reconstruction, clay becomes understood not as passive matter, but as a substance capable of carrying exhaustion, pressure, memory, and transformation simultaneously. The repetitive reclaiming of clay gradually began functioning as both a physical and psychological process, reflecting how lived experience continuously reshapes human beings emotionally, materially, and spiritually. As clay changes texture, density, and form through pressure and reworking, the performance parallels the ways life itself alters the body, perception, memory, and inner sense of self over time.

The work is also informed by meditation and philosophical ideas surrounding samsara, surrender, impermanence, and liberation from attachment to fixed identity or stable form. Within the video, repetitive gestures continuously shift between construction and dissolution, control and release, endurance and exhaustion, allowing bodily action itself to become the primary sculptural material.

Rather than presenting dissolution as an endpoint, State of Becoming approaches transformation as a continual process in which rebuilding becomes inseparable from breaking apart, and where renewal emerges through repetition, surrender, labour, and continual return.