Still Growing - What Holds Series

What Holds Series

This work explores growth as a system rather than a symbol.

Derived from the abstracted tree language first developed in Her Revival, this piece isolates structure: moments of branching, interruption, and continuity - while removing the figure in favor of focusing on the environment that shapes it.

Powder-coated steel lines move through the composition as both framework and resistance. Reclaimed ceramic tile, hand-cut and wet-saw cut, fills the negative space, each tessera carrying subtle material variation and history. The work relies on contrast: rigid and organic, controlled and adaptive, precise and imperfect.

The composition reflects how growth actually occurs: not linearly, but through collision, redirection, and constraint. Structure does not resolve chaos here; it holds it.

Created shortly before a period of extended recovery, the piece reads in hindsight as a form of architectural intuition: mapping thresholds before they were consciously understood.

I have long been drawn to the tension between organic and industrial systems. I share more about the origins and influences behind Mercedes Austin Art in the accompanying blog.