VENUS
Project made in 2013
VENUS
This series made in 2013 and takes its inspiration from Venus, the goddess — and through her, the power of femininity and the occult. Crystals became a natural material for the project, carrying with them an association with ritual, intuition, and hidden knowledge that felt inseparable from the theme.
Venus has long been a symbol of beauty, desire, and generative power — an image both revered and mythologized, shaped as much by the eye that beholds her as by what she actually is. I wanted to work with that tension: beauty not as something smooth or given, but as something forced into being, drawn out through struggle.
The process itself was a brutal one. I worked with blocks of solid balsa wood, using a knife to tear and cut the material apart — not to carve with precision, but to fight the wood open, to examine the inner beauty of its structure. Balsa is soft, fibrous, easily bruised; cutting into it felt less like shaping and more like an act of exposure. Beneath the surface, the grain revealed itself in soft, pale striations — an interior structure that could only be reached by force.
Out of each block, I pulled a flower — wrenched, rather than formed, from the solid wood. The flower became the central image of the series: fragile and soft, but born through violence, echoing the way femininity and beauty are so often demanded rather than freely given. The crystals were set alongside these forms as a counterpoint and companion — hard, faceted, otherworldly — carrying the occult undertone of the project and standing in for Venus's other nature: not only soft-bodied beauty, but power, mysticism, and command.
Together, the balsa wood and crystal speak to two sides of the same figure — the vulnerability of something pulled forcibly into bloom, and the hard, radiant power that watches over it.