Twenty years teaching martial arts, a school built by hand, two decades of teaching in schools and community centres. That is where the subject comes from.
What the work is about
Fighting is an appetite we're all born with, and it's so constant we stop noticing it, the way we stop noticing gravity. A baby fighting to be born, an argument with yourself at midnight over whether to open the fridge, two countries at war: the same appetite at different volumes. Someone is always paying for where we stand with it, usually someone who had no part in choosing. Fighting can't be removed, only refined, and it can't be refined alone. Refinement is the path between fighting others for ourselves, and fighting ourselves for others, walked in both directions for a lifetime, never arrived at.
You complete the work
A viewer completes a visual piece. That isn't a compliment to the audience, it's how the work functions. Refinement cannot be done alone, and neither can this: the work needs someone to extend toward and retrieve from, over and over. Without that it stays unfinished.
What members get
The workbench. Sketches, the pieces that got wrecked and why, studio footage, and recordings before they go public. Not a finished feed, the actual bench.
Where the money goes
Materials, studio time, and the work that has no buyer yet: the dinners, the installations, the books. Membership is what lets those exist before anyone decides they should.