Albert Yonathan Setyawan’s ceramic installations are developed through repeated forms made in a slip-cast method. In this process, the original objects are replicated using a mould, often more than 1000 times, in a process the artist describes as ‘art labour’. For Setyawan, this repeated, labour-intensive practice is meditative – and the artist’s bodily actions when working with clay, and his deep consideration of symbols, formal repetition and symmetry, are fundamental elements of his practice. He considers how meaning is created through repetition – the universality of patterns in nature as well as how symbols are interred with meaning across cultures and religions, as he states: ‘repetition changes nothing in the object but changes something in the mind which contemplates it’.

Created with more than 3000 individual ceramic objects, Spires of Undifferentiated Being 2023–24 consists of two symbols – a flame and a hand – that signal the process of creating the work itself, as well as philosophies central to Setyawan’s practice. The hand is representative of the artist’s body as an instrument of making, and also a vehicle through which to engage with the world. The flame symbolises the process that transforms clay into a pervasive material, and, by extension, human evolution as a material process that traverses cultures and time.