The Stele

By 2025, I was no longer interested in keeping augmented reality as something you hold in your hand. I wanted to know what would happen if digital memory became embedded within the physical language of my sculpture.

I moved AR into steel.

AR STELE PROTOTYPE I came out of my thinking about the stele as a historical form—a marker, a record carved into material and intended to endure. Across ancient civilizations, stelae have been used to commemorate people, document events, record laws, mark boundaries and preserve histories. They are among our oldest forms of public memory.

I became interested in what a stele could become within my own practice.

I work with reclaimed steel: material that has already had a life before it reaches me. I cut it, weld it and transform it into something intended to carry memory forward. With AR STELE PROTOTYPE I, I began experimenting with how that physical object could hold another layer of information that could not be seen simply by looking at its surface.

Because I don’t make silent objects.

With this work, the sculpture becomes a trigger point. You encounter it physically—weight, material, scale, presence. But when activated through augmented reality, another layer becomes accessible. The object can hold context. It can hold history. It can hold voices and stories that were never formally recorded in the landscape.

You are no longer simply looking at an artwork. You are standing before an object that knows why it exists and is prepared to tell you.

This was the point where my welding practice and my augmented-reality practice became one practice rather than two separate experiments.

The steel is the body. The AR is the voice. Neither is complete without the other.

AR STELE PROTOTYPE I became an early Monument Study and an important prototype for what I would later develop at a much larger scale: monumental steel works capable of functioning simultaneously as sculpture, marker and living archive.

The making-of film below documents the fabrication of AR STELE PROTOTYPE I and the process of turning reclaimed steel into a vessel for memory.