Titty flower (2019& 2025)

Silicone, wood, steel, led light

During a brutal winter in Korea, I visited my grandmother for the first time in over a decade. In the middle of a feminist awakening, I had stopped wearing a bra, and my hardened nipples poked through my wool sweater. She burst into laughter and asked to see them. Hesitant but intrigued, I agreed, feeling as though she was about to read my fortunes like a palm. She peeked, laughed harder, and said they resembled my mother’s, before predicting I’d meet a great husband like my father.

Years later, back in Sydney, I returned to this moment through casting. In my garage, I made molds of my nipples and combined them with heirloom tomatoes and capsicums, translating them into silicone. The material is seductive—fleshy, tactile, slightly too real. I cast them compulsively until exhaustion, ending with 444 nipple-flowers in total, a number I later learned was an angel number. By then, my grandmother had passed. I like to imagine her watching over me, still cackling at the whole thing.

What began as a private exchange became a work of excess—humour, inheritance, repetition, and abjection all blooming into form. The Nipple Flower Towers transform a moment of laughter and intimacy into an absurd, devotional ritual: a titty tree for my grandmother, a garden of memory, desire, and resilience.