What the work says. My perspective on fine dining explained. Table This sculptural table serves as both stage and symbol. Made of butcher block, a material associated with preparation and domestic labor, its surface is carved with the delicate silhouette of a blossoming apple branch—a gesture of reverence for seasonality and vulnerability. The fitted with kitchen pipes, industrial and utilitarian, subtly reference the hidden systems that uphold the rituals of fine dining: plumbing, labor, and service. This work embodies the juxtaposition between fragility and function. Who prepares the ritual? Who is allowed to remain unseen? Menu Fragility Delicate and directive, this hand-sewn menu exists between ephemera and artifact—a tactile script that sets the tone for the performance of the meal. Stitched paper, the embroidery enacts a slowness that resists the acceleration of capitalist time, identifying the intimate, manual labor so often hidden behind the seamless delivery of luxury. More than function, it reiterates the apple blossom— a botanical emblem of impermanence and renewal—invoking spring as a metaphor for revival and a measure of ecological time. As an object, the menu is inherently unstable: subject to fray, tear, and dissolution, just like the seasonal ingredients it accompanies. It resists durability in a culture that values permanence, offering instead a fleeting gesture toward care and presence. Functioning as an instruction manual, it reconfigures the role of the diner from consumer to performer, emphasizing the ritualistic nature of fine dining. It articulates a quiet social script, turning silence into a shared language. In doing so, it exposes the underlying choreography of high-end meals, where behavior is often dictated as much by unspoken codes of etiquette as by personal appetite or need. Ultimately, the menu becomes a contract of mutual stillness, a fragile interface between nature’s cycle and culinary performance. It questions what is gained and lost when food transcends sustenance—when eating becomes an act of ritual, severed from the body's hunger but full of cultural, aesthetic, and social expectations. Watercolor Painting Divided Growth This painting portrays a young apple tree in first bloom, a moment of hopeful emergence. It is visually structured by the contrast between a rigid, straight branch and organic, curved ones—a tension that reflects a memory of grafting my first tree- a pink lady apple tree, with the gentle guide of my grandfather. But it also parallels the artificial interventions within natural systems. The straight branch suggests control, planning, cultivation, while the curved ones retain the wild and spontaneous character of nature. This piece holds space for the vulnerability of new growth, echoing the concept of silent revival through visual restraint and asymmetry. Still Life Photography This series of photographs recalls the vanitas genre, which historically reflected on mortality, decadence, and the fleeting nature of pleasure. Here, applied is its formal language—dark backgrounds, rich textures, symbolic arrangement—to ingredients from the Ephemeral Table. The result is a meditation on luxury as illusion: a cultivated scarcity, where each image amplifies the value of ingredients by removing them from their use. These works critique the transformation of food from sustenance to spectacle. Through a lens of static opulence, examine how ecological time is flattened into consumable beauty. Aquatint Etching Two plates This pair of etchings explores the origin of food and the labor behind its transformation, using the symbolic imagery of a single apple tree and the conceptual framework of printmaking itself. The title, Two Plates, refers not to dining vessels, but to the etched metal plates used in intaglio —surfaces that bear the silent, physical impressions of labor, repetition, and time. The tree depicted is one from the garden of the restaurant where I work—old, weathered, and gnarled by time, its bark textured with lichen and moss, contrasting starkly with the mechanized and curated aesthetics of the fine dining world. It stands for natural time—cyclical, irregular, and unpolished. The prints are pulled on paper handmade from shallot and garlic skins, culinary remnants typically discarded, now preserved as material memory. This choice roots the work in an ecology of care and waste, embedding the intimate residues of kitchen labor into the very surface of the artwork. The work gestures toward the contradiction between ecological cycles and the static perfection demanded by capitalist systems, asking: What marks are left behind in the process of transformation? What traces remain of the hands that prepare, print, or plate?