A RECORD OF LOOKING CLOSELY AT PLACES THAT DO NOT YET EXIST.
an archive built from places that cannot be visited, yet somehow feel remembered.
What began as a rusty nail found outside a dollar store became an investigation into scale, structure, and the possibility of a world that did not yet exist.
The nail suggested the image of a strange object passing through—or resting across—three monolithic stone formations, reminiscent of Stonehenge. I began by building a small balsa wood model to test the idea spatially. From there, the investigation expanded into larger 1/16-scale studies of the three points of contact, allowing the relationship between the object and the stones to become more physical and architectural.
The rusty nail eventually became the conceptual seed for a derelict ship.
What was originally intended as a simple representation of the idea began to develop its own identity. Built and refined in 3D, the ship gradually became something that felt less designed and more grown - as though it had accumulated around the original investigation and eventually overtaken it.
Within the bow of the ship, I introduced a floating office and workshop: a secluded interior belonging to a fictional hermit inventor. This became an opportunity to investigate not only the exterior form of the ship, but the life that might exist inside it - how someone might inhabit, work, and construct within such an unusual environment.
The project is set on a fictional coast in a world I am developing, situated around the 1850s.
Derelict Monument — project study
The original balsa model was never intended to be the final object. It was a tool for asking a question. Each iteration became another attempt to discover where that question might lead.
The next stage is to bring the environment into Unreal Engine and turn the object into an inhabitable space—a linear journey from stern to bow, with the possibility of expanding the experience through the ship’s interior and the surrounding monolithic formations.
The investigation is still ongoing.
Investigation 001
ET — Derelict Monument
2026
