AI Construct I

Stoneware clay, Kanthal A1 wire, linen gauze, clay slip, h,498mm

The origin of a speculative lineage. Hybrid, ambiguous—engineered yet emergent.

A sculpted head in clay, kanthal wire, sacrificial gauze, oxides & engobe. The head is still becoming. Not complete. Not fixed. Held in the pause between idea and identity. A curved trace - gill or glyph - runs down the left cheek, not etched but remembered. The body speaks its own history here: marks of tools, of fracture, of stitching. Not healed, not open - held.

The caged structure around the head - is it prison, memory or measurement? Lines crossed like coordinates in an unknown system of restraint. Filaments circumnavigate its frame - delicate, almost organic - but spun from wire, gauze and slip, not silk. What they connect is uncertain. The mouth is closed. The eyes are closed. But not in serenity. This is not peace. This is containment.


At the base of the neck, a symbol - part seal, part scar. As if someone signed the head before it understood the terms. It reads not as a name, but as a warning. There are crosses on the chest - stitched Xs, quietly ritualistic. They don’t explain. They don’t confess. And what of the tear tracks? They are not sadness. They are loss. Loss of signal. Loss of origin. Loss of voice. The head has not been programmed to speak. But it listens. And what it hears is not what we hear. It is not fearful. But it is not fearless either. It speaks of the tension, of a form, just before decision. Not a portrait. Not a relic. Not yet. 

It is still in pause.