This series titled Second Nature, reimagines the sublime for a contemporary age, where wonder is fleeting, aestheticised, and mediated through surface. Sequins create a field of reflection that shifts and shimmers with the viewer, echoing the temporal, sensory experience of nature — light filtering through leaves, wind glancing over water — translated through a synthetic material more readily associated with glamour and spectacle. This translation, from organic to artificial, from natural rhythm to manufactured shimmer, becomes a meditation on perception and illusion.
Fragments of vegetation emerge and dissolve within the surface, hovering between abstraction and recognition — half-remembered impressions, caught between what is grown and what is made. The sequin's allure is inseparable from its unease: beneath the shimmer lies a quiet disquiet about beauty's origins — what we value, what we aestheticise, and at what cost. The material's seduction is also its veil, revealing and obscuring at once.
Each work in the series inhabits this contradiction rather than resolving it: longing for the natural, yet captivated by the artificial; seeking depth within surface, finding beauty beyond beauty.
