Relational Painting, 2026, Moore Contemporary, Boorloo/Perth, Australia.

Relational Painting begins with a precise act of return. In 2017, Mobile Composition reconvened a now-dispersed art collection through placeholders made in quilted black goat leather, restaging archival photographs and a historically specific choreography of installation. One marked the absence of Fritz Glarner’s Relational Painting No. 62 (1953), carrying forward only its title and scale.

Here, Relational Painting No. 62 functions as a hinge, linking an earlier investigation of modernist interiors, collections and loss to one in which ‘relational painting’ becomes an ongoing practice. The work unfolds through assembly, bringing fragments into relation through alignment and misalignment, where meaning is contingent and produced through proximity.

mobile composition

Mobile Composition, 2017, Maison Louis Carré, Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, with Association Alvar Aalto en France
Quilted aniline goat leather, HD video, artist publication. Photos: Lucy Dawkins

Mobile Composition is a parallel installation and artist book that focuses on the interior of Alvar Aalto’s Maison Louis Carré and the art collection of Paris art dealer Louis Carré, for whom the house was built. Working from archive photographs of the collection fixed at a specific moment in 1962, amidst a constant flow of paintings in and out of the house, the project examines its posthumous dispersal and attempts to reconvene it through other means. Acting as placeholders, eighteen key works were identified and (re)produced in quilted black goat leather, retaining only the titles and dimensions of the originals, and installed and documented to restage the original photographs.

Named after a small standing mobile in the collection by Alexander Calder, the work considers how artefacts and architecture might move through the world and collide in ways that open up access to peripheral histories and wider narratives.

eclipse sequence

Eclipse Sequence, 2019, HIAP (Helsinki International Artist Programme), Finland. Aniline goat leather, HD video, mirrors, bookplates from Josef Sudek: The Commercial Photography of Družstevní Práce. Photos: Sheung Yiu

Eclipse Sequence brings together a series of moments shaped by proximity, movement and perception. The installation incorporates a video projected into a circular opening cut through goat lather, floor-based mirrors that double and move the gallery’s existing wind tunnels and a cut and collaged assembly of bookplates taken from Josef Sudek: The Commercial Photography of Druzstevni Prace.

rhythm without end

Rhythm Without End, 2021, Design Museum Helsinki, Finland
gelatin silver prints (photograms); Aino Aalto, Bolgeblick (1932), pressed glass, manufactured by Iittala. An Index of Infinite Rotation, 2019-20, images from Design Museum Helsinki’s image archive, alongside the artist’s photographs of material in the archive and collection. Photos: Paavo Lehtonen

Rhythm Without End draws on the collection and image archives of Design Museum Helsinki, using ideas of circulation, rhythm and repetition to explore how objects might simultaneously inhabit our world and be a lens through which to view it. Circularity, as a formal and figurative concept, becomes evident across disciplines in forms that revolve, radiate, are rolled or turned. The installation follows this logic through a deep focus on a single design, Aino Aalto’s 1932 Bölgeblick glassware, influenced by concentric ripples that form on still water when disturbed. Produced in a centrifuge, its design echoes its making and the way liquid glass behaves when subjected to high-speed revolution and gravitational force. The photograms continue this engagement with circularity, translating the object into an image, its form dissolved and reconstituted as a photographic negative – an inversion of itself.