Date: 2025 Materials: Carving in locally grown Himalayan Cedar, pencil, charcoal paint, stain, sealer Dimensions: 610 x 200 x 200 Winner Timbecon Against the Grain competition, finalist Wollongong Art Prize
Holding Hope
Emerging from the burnt landscapes of New South Wales—where charred trunks rise like sentinels and green shoots break through blackened bark—this sculpture inhabits the threshold between ruin and renewal. It evokes a terrain where trauma and regrowth coexist, where devastation becomes the site of potential.
A female figure walks forward across scorched ground, her lower body darkened by a story of flames. In one arm she carries a small dog, its fur singed at the tips—an image of tenderness held within adversity. Together, they suggest a quiet interdependence, a gesture of care against the backdrop of collapse.
Dressed in an oversized ice hockey jersey, the figure wears the number 37. Detached from its sporting origins, the number takes on an abstract charge—no longer a mere identifier but a fragment of an unseen system, a glyph from the architecture of the invisible. Sportswear here becomes symbolic material: armour, costume, ritual uniform. It gestures toward devotion, repetition, the pursuit of purpose—a kind of secular mysticism embedded in practice.
Hand-carved in wood, the sculpture insists on slowness. In a time marked by acceleration, the labour of carving becomes an act of resistance.
This work might be read as a contemporary totem—open, provisional, and resonant. It reflects a global condition of displacement and fragility: communities shaped by fire, war, and flood, carrying what they can as they move through aftermath. Yet within its stance is not only grief, but momentum. The sculpture invites reflection on resilience—not as heroic triumph, but as the ability to endure, to adapt, to hold space for hope. It belongs to a tradition of works where individual experience reflects shared global challenges, and where material form carries both intimate and universal meaning.
