Somewhere Better – This Place — a twelve-foot paper ground, with ceramic colonies on it and a cluster of them lifted off above its top edge — The colonies are held by magnets, and come off the ground.

The colonies are held by magnets, and come off the ground.

Somewhere Better – This Place — two tall paper panels hung on either side of a room corner, ceramic fragments scattered across the walls between them

Detail: pale ceramic flakes fused into clusters on the paper ground, where a pink field gives way to blue

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Somewhere Better – This Place

2026 · Series · Paper on canvas with wood armatures, ceramic, magnets, and interactive work for browser · Dimensions variable (up to 12 ft)

In Somewhere Better – This Place I take a close look at the smallest organisms, who, even being simple, can feel environment, communicate and act as a whole and migrate acting together.

This is an inhabited environment where a red field coils into a blue one. The grounds are paper on canvas, worked until they lost their flatness, carrying thin flakes or petals flattened by hand and chaotically fused into bodies like colonies. Some of the colonies have left the grounds and are on the bare wall. I am wondering whether they are leaving something or looking for something, and whether these are different. This installation is not exactly a static work: what you see is just a captured moment of constant movement.

The exploration and play with the artwork continues in the browser of your device. Come close to them, and the colonies pass the alarm to their neighbours, leave the place where they lived, and fuse into one body to move together. Left alone, they come apart again. You are the environment they are answering.

The work running in a browser: colonies alarmed and gathered into bodies, one of them up on the white above the cloth's edge, a pale patch where the colour has been lifted, and a line of the writing overhead — Slime moulds are cosmopolitan and spend most of their time as single-celled organisms. Their entire body acts as a sensory membrane. And when the environment is not friendly, they start signalling each other and move as a single body — a social amoeba — which migrates away from harmful chemicals towards food-rich areas.

The third canvas seen whole: a long horizontal cloth, creased and never flat, blue fields gathering at the left and red at the right

The left of the third canvas, where the blue is deepest and folds run down through it