Shaun-Joel’s work explores a material language that brings into play the natural world and Zen Buddhism’s practice of mindfulness. Formal geometric structures and playfully chaotic found materials allude to the interplay between rationality and intuition. Through this project he has worked to harmonise his intuitive decision making with analytical processes that trace the geometries of the universe.
The aim was to develop a visual language that evokes interconnectedness between the self, the natural world, and the cosmos – an experience many Buddhist and Hindu notions try to express – through archetypal structures like two-dimensional forms, three-dimensional platonic solids, naturally occurring materials and binary representations. The work utilizes familiar geometric forms in repetitive patterns to create a sense of order and grounding, whilst the use of natural objects, as benign and desensitized as we are to them, aims to thwart expectations of geometric structures.