In Wayward Pillars, Edged Expanse, Hạ-Lan Văn approaches carving as a practice of uncovering and clarifying, an improvisational gesture rooted in both play and necessity. Working with reclaimed wood sourced from District 8 in Saigon where communities extend the lives of materials through repair and resale, she brings creaturehood to industrial lumber. Memory is embedded in these materials, not as nostalgia, but as a way of seeing. Fifty hand-cut wood segments, sourced from secondhand furniture and deconstructed buildings, become modular units for world-building. Urgent, intuitive cuts transform these fragments into forms that evoke temples, vortices, or boxes, asking what might emerge when industrial remnants are animated with care and imagination.

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-Anh Đào Ha 

*Excerpt from Architectures of Intimacy press release