MW : Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?  ( and ) How do you decide on the materials you use in your work, and do you have specific methods for collecting them?

HU : I scan the ground. I’m always looking at the ground, I don’t look up, I have no sense of direction, I don’t know if I ever really know where I am. I always carry a big bag. This is mostly for trash, I’m also one of those just-in-case people, I don’t have enough meat on my bones, I have poor circulation, I get chilly on the subway.

I carry too much, I look like I’ve had a long day, my back hurts. I am hunched for trash, permanent bow, I am not uplifting or upcycling, insult, I am not some trash flanneur, but I am discerning.

I like it suitably mangled and in either an interesting shape, or a useful shape. I know what is common and what is rare, I like grubby forks but they have to be smashed a certain way and mostly grey.

These are common so I can be picky.

Trash in a good green is hard to find, it has to come from something old.

An invisalign is a major prize.

Good trash is along the edges or in the cracks of the sidewalk, or accumulates in corners, alongside buildings and chain-link fence. The best trash you find in the middle of the crosswalk, it’s been kicked to the middle and run over, you look both ways real quick and snatch.

MW : Some assemblages suggest a form of mapping or ritualistic tool without a fixed utility and narrative. Are you constructing a personal mythology, or exploring how shared symbolic systems function and collapse?

HU : I see “personal mythology”, used generally, as a genre which utilizes an individual’s narrative such that it represents a cultural attitude or value, isomorphic, but scaled up, human form.

It could be an allegory, a metaphor, synecdoche. It gives the personal the semblance of general appeal, applicability. It is clearly performative, but for personal mythology to retain efficacy, authenticity is the determining factor, human form.

Conversely, in this practice, aspects of the personal are fragmented and dissolved into an incongruent system, impersonal, grid-like, schematic. Inhuman form, the performativity is emphasized, authenticity is a moot question.In which case, I can perhaps rearrange your question, argue that a de-personalized mythology explores how shared systems function and collapse.

MW : Your work brings together cast, sculpted, and found materials. How do you decide when an object’s existing cultural residue or history is important to preserve versus when it needs to be disrupted and transformed ?

HU :  At this point, it’s extremely rare that I disrupt an object. One exception is currency, I’ll cut coins and bills to momentarily disrupt their function, bringing one back to the thingness of the thing. The realization of that action brings one back to what has been broken, and there’s an oscillation between subverting power and affirming power, particularly given how heavy handed the act is, it’s pretty dumb, it’s decidedly embarrassing, it’s contradictory.

I initially came to sculpture from painting, as a student I only painted on found board; I would paint over found objects. I was struck by how paint created a skin, it shifted the perception of an object without directly editing it. Leave a part of the object bare, and there’s this tension between paint-veil and thing. As I got more into sculpting and casting, I could go a
step further, and create a similar tension purely through juxtaposition. The cast details are ornamental and biomorphic, sculpted from an eclectic range of historical sources, and could be referential, could be fantastical.

There’s a seductiveness to this, to the sculpting, to the transmutation in casting itself, to the regional viscosity in which the objects are subsumed. But they’re still decidedly separate parts, placed next to each other. 

Punctuated. 

Opulent as my style is, I allow myself this license on the basis that objects are fundamentally deadpan.

 It will always break.

MW : You reference ritual and mythos, do your assemblages emerge from invented personal mythologies, or are they responding to broader cultural ones?

HU : Neither: I have a specific viewpoint on mythology as a process, I then use it as a foil for a broader, expanded working definition of aesthetics, my methodology roughly mirrors this, it’s a way to model. 

I have a particular puzzle-like compositional approach to arranging objects. This mode comes into interaction with chance, the technical requirements of a material support, it momentarily guides or is guided by complimentary research, and then turns back in, and over, and over. I look at myth broadly, as a rolling, cumulative series of heterogeneous interactions between internal, formal necessity and external contingency or function.

Myth subsumes fragments. When you encounter a myth, you’re seeing a reconfigured section of a core sample, you’re seeing sedimentation, experiencing it like art.

I like to think of aesthetics as a kind of momentary suction, a regional aura which mimics the prosody of a given rationale such that it may bridge, hybridize abutting systems. Perhaps even the real and ideal if you want to go that far. 

Aesthetics is the semblance of coherence itself. 

It’s a kind of quasi-logic which feels instinctively, resolutely correct, is at times verifiably correct, but which would not technically hold up if a standardized logic were applied; it’s a functional, irregular, quasi-logic. In an epoch where every given surface seems to metastasize complexity, fractal surface, this kind of provisional aesthetic reasoning is increasingly prevalent, drenched.

If one were to say that my practice is to do with this overwhelm, with this interaction between surface and withdrawal, they would be correct, but only in partial. I want to go a step further. I think that art can utilize aesthetics in a way distinct from other arenas: it fails to occlude, it rides the slippage. Sinkhole, an inversion, it somehow widens the aesthetic, the gesture and the gap. Its nudity is naked; there’s something about the exposure as byproduct of critical apparatus, mechanisms splayed, which I earnestly believe grazes the ineffable.

MW : In your statement, you mention trash as something transformed alongside the self. How does personal change, narrative, and biography enter into your material choices and work?

HU : I’ve taken the death of the author a pinch too far past the page, you could say it’s to do with the dissolution of the biographical. Trash, fingernail clippings, hair, blood, these things are all intimate, but lack identity, they are anonymous. Literal detachment. When I write “I” or “she”, I don’t think about myself, I don’t feel myself.

Loss.
Loss breaks narrative. I am sometimes confused about tense. If you are sullied, you have been sullied, you are fundamentally sullied; if you lose, you have lost, it is fundamental loss.  

Same goes for love, in some other, better way.

There are changes which are particular to temporal points on one hand, but which exist in a state of always-already on the other, they make you abstract, they make the self abstract. This is a personal phenomena in itself, it is also an experiential, immediately accessible way to pull the mind to ontology, to broader conceptual quandaries.

Alongside tense, trash has an issue with fragments, nominal recognition, parts and wholes,
as do I.

MW : Mythos suggests repetition or ritual. Are there recurring gestures or compositional habits you’ve noticed returning across different bodies of work?

HU : There are cast objects interspersed with the found ones, they’re hand sculpted in oil clay, molded, and cast in plaster, wax, or resin. I design them as modular parts, they can connect with each other, accent the surface of an object, fit around a contour, I sculpt them in mirrored pairs and then cast multiples, indeed, there’s certainly repetition.

A composition will usually start with a couple or few objects which shunk into each other, at which point, one face might, say, have a line which can be continued, which then must be counterbalanced. This will set off a chain of balances, counterbalances, and offsets. A common strategy, for instance, is using multiple mirrored detail pairs and then, once that expectation is set, I’ll embed a copied pair in a very select place: 

L-R, L-R, L-L  

The L-L will then either be subtle enough that it’s a momentary, jarring break, or create a careening left movement, I’ll need another L in an alternate quadrant, I’ll give an object a left tilt, and then a bulky piece of R-weighted trash as either block or counterweight. It just continues until you run out of moves, reach a tipping point, I imagine it to be a kind of additive negation,

I think of the Sorites paradox, I think about grains of rice.

MW : You describe your work as mimicking visual language while avoiding legibility. Are you interested in viewers trying to decode translations, or have them sit with ambiguity and confront the limits of interpretation?

HU : I suppose it’s the latter, but to get there the former can be a useful scaffold, if only that it may be frustrated. My emphasis on the schematic, on ritual layouts, the pictographic is to do with rhythm, silent beats one grain short of a heap. I’d like to hope that in the end, the focus is less on language’s failure, more on the experience itself, which I see as outside of it.

I think of titles as loose categories or buckets you can toss aspects into or up against.
When I name something, I get this feeling like a small but dense object has been dropped in a long dark well.

MW :  Spite and humor appear as active forces in the work. Do they function more as critique of external systems or as self-directed gestures?

HU : Well - imagine if I were to cut my own arm off, swaddle it, and cry out, oh look, a baby. 

This would be true.

It would be spiteful, it would be facetious, but at the back the act is very true. 

If you divide one by two, you get two, 

this is true. 

This scenario is in fact reproductive: it is a reproduction. 

It’s true.
I swear it’s true, there is a transcendent spite which speaks to a universalized grief, a loss of sense, last ditch a cornered conscious pulls pedantic, there’s a hyperawareness, disorientation (reorientation) of parameters within a system presumed closed, asexual reproduction is perverse but an extant phenomenon, reproduction by budding is productive even if you bleed out, it is critical, it’s also strangely optimistic given the times, rupture rapture without the new, without external resources, there’s agency despite, you could say I possess sympathy for the riot, Iphimedia,

I have feelings for the riptide.

When you have work which undercuts, undercuts, undercuts, you shift the locus of identity, 
it recedes, recedes;

there’s an undertow.

( This interview was conducted by Material Works ( MW ) in the spring of 2026 )

@xx.clytemnestra.xx