Flight

When I first moved to Cebu in my early 20s, I frequently used to paddle my kayak from Mactan Island, off Cebu, Philippines, across to Santa Rosa some 5 km away. Every so often, I’d be joined by dolphins — sometimes just gliding nearby, other times leaping and playing around as if for the sheer fun of it. Those moments stayed with me — that feeling of freedom and the rare joy of connecting with creatures so different, yet sharing in a moment of pure, wordless celebration of life. Flight grew out of that memory. I wanted to capture that feeling of connection with nature and the effortless joy of movement.

I began working on Flight in 2018, returning to it on and off over the course of a year. It was a breakthrough piece for me — one where I refined my technique in casting reconstituted limestone for the Renaissance-inspired surround and spent months experimenting with hydraulics to design waterworks that would all but conceal the supporting structure. I completed the piece in early 2019 and installed it for a year at Harleyford Golf Course, just outside London, before bringing the piece back to the workshop to further refine the waterworks and take the engineering a step further.

With Flight I wanted to capture the dolphins’ exhilarating sense of freedom and joy through an unconventional use of water. My aim was for the viewer to subconsciously ‘erase’ the four ovular anchor stems supporting the dolphins by using water sprays projected up their outer faces. Four pumps drive water through specially engineered combs along the outer surfaces of the ovular posts, while also driving water inside them — channelling through a network of stainless-steel pipes that release gentle cascades from the dolphins’ tails, flippers and bellies. The result is a sculpture that seems to defy gravity — alive, weightless and caught in perpetual motion.