Artist Statement
This project examines how sacred classical imagery is transformed by contemporary digital culture — where reverence collides with spectacle, and the divine is filtered through screens, brands, and algorithmic desire.
Summary
Divine Disruption: Classical Forms in the Era of Absurdity reimagines canonical sculptures — Venus, Athena, the Dancing Faun, and Kuan-Yin — inside a culture of devices, interfaces, and branding. Using Blender as a sculptural tool, I juxtapose classical ideals of beauty, wisdom, and transcendence with contemporary symbols of mediation: VR headsets, action cameras, QR codes, and cryptocurrency. The resulting works are humorous yet critical. They reveal how meaning is produced, circulated, and consumed through screens — how devotion becomes interaction, and the sacred becomes content.
Conceptually, the series draws on postmodern theories of appropriation, simulation, and remix aesthetics. It asks what remains of “the divine” once it is endlessly recontextualised and aestheticised as digital novelty. Rather than rejecting technology, the project examines our reliance on it to define value and identity. The sculptures are seductive by design — polished, luminous, and visually ‘clickable’ — inviting contemplation of a harder truth: that our longing for transcendence persists, even as it is channelled through the absurd rituals of a networked age.
Full Statement
Read the full statement
In Divine Disruption: Classical Forms in the Era of Absurdity, I explore how sacred imagery and cultural memory are transformed within the hyper-saturated environment of digital media. Using Blender as a sculptural tool, I reimagine classical figures such as the Venus de Milo, Athena, and the Dancing Faun which are icons once associated with beauty, wisdom, and vitality, and isntead I put them into surreal, technological scenarios. These interventions are humorous on the surface but critical in intent: they reveal how even the most revered forms of art have become commodities within a world obsessed with novelty, branding, and simulation.
The title Divine Disruption describes both the process and the philosophy behind the work. The “divine” refers to the classical ideals of harmony, proportion, and transcendence that shaped Western art history. The “disruption” side of the title signals the intrusion of absurdity and consumer technology, or objects that represent our new “rituals of devotion”. A VR headset, a GoPro, a QR code, or a cryptocurrency symbol may seem trivial on the surface, yet they now command the same reverence once reserved for sacred relics. By merging these two visual languages, I aim to hold a mirror to the contradictions of contemporary culture, where the search for meaning often unfolds through the absurd interface of the digital lives we live today.
Each sculpture operates within this tension. Venus.exe transforms the goddess of beauty into a blind participant in virtual reality, suggesting how human desire is now mediated through screens. Athena.exe, rendered in translucent candy-like material, celebrates wisdom while parodying our obsession with self-documentation and performative intellect. Dancing Faun: Just Dance replaces its free spirited movement with algorithmic choreography, turning joy into measurable perfection. Kuan-Yin: QR Enlightenment fuses Eastern spirituality with financial iconography, where compassion becomes a transaction, and faith just becomes data. Finally, Rus-tic Hollow reflects on memory itself: a holographic image framed in digital wood, existing halfway between heritage and illusion. Together, these works form a satirical pantheon for a world that both worships and trivialises its past.
Humour is essential to my practice, but it functions as a form of critical empathy rather than mockery. I am not laughing at history or at belief systems, but rather I am laughing with them, from within the absurdity of the present. By reimagining sacred figures through contemporary objects of desire, I want to show that our relationship with the divine has not disappeared but changed its form. We still seek transcendence; we simply find it through pixels, performance, and consumption. The VR headset is our new altar, the social feed our new stained glass window. Absurdity, therefore, becomes a tool of revelation and a way to make the contradictions visible that define our digital existence.
Conceptually, this body of work draws from postmodern theories of appropriation and simulation. Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of postproduction describes how artists remix existing cultural materials to generate new meanings; my digital workflow embodies this logic by sampling and recomposing canonical sculptures into new configurations. Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum, which means the copy without an original, resonates deeply with my process, as these sculptures exist only as virtual files and rendered images. They are “hyperreal” artefacts, referencing a physical world they never inhabited. Lev Manovich’s writings on the remix aesthetic further contextualise my approach, positioning digital art as inherently hybrid and intertextual. Through these lenses, Divine Disruption becomes less a series of objects and more a network of ideas about authenticity, value, and the shifting definition of “real.”
Materially, I embrace the artificiality of the digital medium. The polished surfaces, neon lighting, and exaggerated textures are intentional. They mimic the visual language of advertising, gaming, and consumer tech design. The result is a deliberately seductive aesthetic that invites viewers in before confronting them with its underlying critique. I see this tension between allure and unease as central to the work’s emotional charge. The goal is not to reject technology but to question the power it holds over how we construct beauty, belief, and identity.
At its core, Divine Disruption is about the persistence of the sacred in an age of absurdity. Even when surrounded by irony and simulation, there remains an instinctive human longing for meaning and connection. The ancient figures I reinterpret are not merely relics, they are witnesses to our evolving forms of faith. Their new digital bodies reveal both what we have lost and what we continue to seek today. The absurd, in this sense, becomes a mirror of our own contradictions: our desire to transcend through the very tools that tether us to the artificial.
By blending humour, critique, and digital craftsmanship, I hope the work encourages reflection on how easily reverence can turn into spectacle, and how perhaps within that spectacle, something profoundly human still endures. Divine Disruption invites viewers to look beyond the surface absurdity and glimpse the uneasy truth beneath it: that even in the most synthetic of worlds, we continue to sculpt the sacred out of chaos.