VITAL MATERIALS is a series of sculptures included in the group show ‘No Better than its Woods’ at Wasps Sleeper Gallery In Edinburgh that was based on a period of research in and around the Black-Woods of Rannoch – one of the last remaining patches of ancient Caledonian woodland in Scotland 

carbon coated Necker cubes hold each-other precariously on a plinth - expressing the fragile balance and ecological interdependence which defines the life support systems on which we rely while industrial expanded steel mesh is used to symbolise the myriad networks and nodes in a complex ecological system. 

These sculptures all focus on relationally -drawing on insights and ideas from the phenomenological philosophy of  Merleau Ponty and David Abrham  and are deeply ecological in the sense of focusing on the vital processes which connect the whole system together rather than just the products while also remaining cognisant of the inescapable subjectivity of experience by drawing on the rippling Moiré effect  as powerful visual metaphor for the phenomenological experience of being in a diverse woodland  thick with invisible lines of communication and multi-species knots of “marvellous specificity” …to look while being looked at and to “see with the eyes of the wind” (Tim Ingold)