Artist Statement — BleuBerry
 

Stack. Let it fall. Then stack again.
I stack cups. One by one. Hundreds, sometimes thousands. I work slowly, holding my breath, trusting the quiet instability beneath each placement. From almost nothing, a structure rises — delicate and monumental at once, beautiful precisely because it will not last.
And when it is complete, I let it fall.

Collapse is not failure. It is the moment the work reveals itself most clearly. Some people laugh. Some gasp. Some fall silent. In that silence lies the central question of my practice: How carefully do we hold the things we say we value?
I begin with the paper cup because it belongs to our time — ordinary, disposable, almost invisible. We carry it in our hands every day and discard it without a second thought. By stacking thousands of these overlooked objects into forms that evoke human aspiration — towers, waves, blossoms, rockets — I place the throwaway beside the monumental.

But the cup is only the beginning. My practice extends to crystal, stainless steel, and traditional Korean bowls. Each material carries its own weight of meaning. A paper cup speaks of what we discard; a celadon bowl, of what we inherit; crystal, of what we believe to be precious. The vessel is my vocabulary, not my limit.

My recent work, Towers of Remembrance, will rise from exactly 2,977 cups — one for each life lost on September 11, 2001. The number is not symbolic. It is literal. To count is already to mourn.

Participation is essential. I do not believe art belongs only in museums. My installations rise in school gymnasiums and community halls, where students and neighbors become co-creators. When a child places a cup with both hands, when a group slows their movements so the structure can stand a little longer, they are not merely assisting an artist. They are learning balance through the body, collaboration through proximity, and impermanence through direct experience.

And when the structure falls, they carry something with them that words cannot fully hold: beautiful things do not protect themselves.
The cups travel. After each installation, they are collected, sorted, and carried to the next site. The artwork disappears, but the material continues. Each new space becomes a living museum; each return carries the memory of what came before — building, collapse, recovery, renewal, until the gesture itself becomes a form of culture.

BleuBerry is my name for this way of working: tender and unstable, playful and serious at once. A berry is small and easily bruised, yet it carries seeds. My installations are the same — quiet structures made from ordinary things, asking how we live, what we preserve, and what we are willing to rebuild together.

I stack cups. I let them fall. Then I invite others to stack again.

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BleuBerry / Installation Artist · Founder, Cup Gallery / Working between Vancouver and the world"