Teuila Va’aelua, Refuse, 2026, wire mesh and rubbish bags.

My practice explores absence, memory, and grief through sculpture, installation, and material experimentation. Much of my work begins with a simple question: how do we encounter what is no longer there?

This investigation emerged following the loss of my grandfather, when I found myself confronted by the strange relationship between presence and trace. Although a person may be gone, evidence remains: a photograph, a piece of clothing, a worn pathway, a dent in a mattress. We often encounter absence not as emptiness, but through the marks left behind. I am interested in how sculpture might materialise these traces and give form to experiences that resist representation.

Textile has become central to this enquiry. Influenced by my research into memory, photography, and memorialisation, I understand fabric as a material capable of holding evidence of pressure, contact, and lived experience. It folds, stretches, sags, and remembers. Rather than depicting specific people or events, the works preserve impressions of something that has passed while withholding certainty about what produced them.

Many of the sculptural forms I create are understood as profiles. Traditionally, a profile identifies an individual through likeness, outline, or silhouette. In my work, however, the profile becomes hollow rather than descriptive. Instead of recording a face, it records a withdrawal. The hollow itself becomes a form of description, suggesting that absence may be understood through the impressions it leaves behind. I am interested in whether absence itself might be profiled, and what remains when identity is reduced to trace alone.

Alongside questions of memory and trace, my practice examines the structures through which grief is understood and contained. Psychological models, therapeutic frameworks, social expectations, and even physical containers attempt to make loss manageable. Yet grief pulls, resurfaces, collapses, and often exceeds the systems designed to contain it.

This tension between containment and overflow informs both my material choices and formal decisions. Lightweight, permeable surfaces and unstable materials recur throughout the work, testing the limits of support and stability. More recently, I have begun experimenting with discarded materials such as rubbish bags, drawn to their capacity to move between protection and disposability, containment and collapse. Their ability to remain lightweight while retaining form interests me, particularly alongside softer, shroud-like fabrics. These materials carry their own social and cultural associations while extending my interest in fragility, transformation, and impermanence.

Across the work, collapse is not understood as failure but as a condition of living. It becomes evidence of pressure, weight, and persistence. The resulting forms exist between presence and absence, structure and vulnerability, containment and release.

Rather than seeking resolution, I am interested in what remains unresolved. The works ask how we might live alongside what cannot be recovered, and whether absence is ever truly empty. Perhaps loss is not defined by what disappears, but by the traces that continue to shape us long after it is gone.