At the time of creating this object, I was interested in how shapes take meaning. I started researching a bit about the five-pointed star shape. It’s so crazy to me that everyone recognizes it as a star. If you’re playing Pictionary and you need to draw the universe, you probably start out with drawing some stars, is what I’m trying to say.

The star shape is a very old symbol, dating back to around 3000 BCE. It was found on some pottery in Sumer (Iraq), you can google it. I know it’s mathematical and it’s probably interesting how the numbers work, but the meaning of it, and how it changed, is more interesting to me. It started out as a cuneiform ideogram. This means the symbol represents an idea or concept and not an actual word.

I really liked the idea of how shapes can hold meaning, or even look like they hold meaning, without being defined by a word. This inspired the drawings I was doing at the time, and the drawing I made of this object stood out to me. The drawings were pretty random and, in a way, soulless. It felt like a cool idea to extrude it into steel and give it a body or some physicality, to let it be born. It resembles a moment in time where I was just doing my thing, thinking a bit, and I like how it captures that.