Trickless Bear (2025)

Wood, steel, motor, synthetic fur, buttons, foam, cotton

The teddy that once danced for audiences is now hunched and breathing. Inside its body, a mechanism makes the back rise and fall with the rhythm of mechanical breath. At this scale, viewers circle nervously, wondering if there is someone inside.

Despite its size, its slouched position makes the bear appear vulnerable. To call something cute usually implies superiority—a power dynamic that in this case transforms into protectiveness rather than control. This rare inversion of power invites tenderness not only toward Teddy, but toward ourselves and each other. You may be prompted to hug the bear, but cannot. Perhaps, instead, you hug a fellow human.

The bear sighs as though the ground might give way. It confesses that the stage is no longer fun. “Who am I dancing for, and for how much longer?” it wonders. Afraid it might drift into a deep sleep, I imagine preparing its favourites—salmon and honey. At once comic and melancholic, Trickless Bear stages fatigue as resistance, and rest as a radical act.

The work also sits within my ongoing interest in how machines might prompt human empathy. Alongside many others working with robotics, I use a technological body to ask what it means to be human: how we care, how we recognise vulnerability, how tenderness can be disarmed from power. But this approach also highlights a larger question. If technology can be used to invite care, why is it so often directed elsewhere—toward sex, killing, or the pursuit of immortality? The bear, in its breathing exhaustion, makes visible these choices. It is not technology itself that is the danger, but the human desires that direct it.