This piece began as a cut section of a large steel vase — effectively the vase sliced in half, leaving a flat, open face as the canvas for the work.

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The brief was intentionally loose: something tactile, abstract at its base, but with the suggestion that the object once served a purpose. That idea led to gears — not painted flat, but built up in three dimensions directly on the surface.

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Each gear was formed using multiple layers of high-build primer, worked up gradually rather than applied in a single pass. The result is a surface with genuine physical depth: as light moves across the piece, it catches each raised edge differently, casting a shallow, shifting shadow that changes with the angle it's viewed from.

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Reproducing that depth accurately — layer matching layer beneath it, built up gradually until the gears held their form — was intricate, time-consuming work. Every layer had to echo the one before it precisely, or the shadow wouldn't read correctly once the piece was finished.

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The finished object doesn't just look mechanical — it behaves like it, catching and releasing light the way a genuinely engineered surface would.