HAI MELLY (❁´◡`❁)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with form. The way light catches an edge. The silent language of shape. The brutality of raw material.

And nothing expresses that better than sculpting.

The First Touch

It starts with your hands.
Cold clay. Smooth marble. A chunk of driftwood still smelling of saltwater.

I picked up a battered block of clay from the studio shelf, unsure what it would become. That uncertainty — that’s the good part. Sculpting isn’t about control. It’s about listening.

“The material remembers everything you do to it.”

I made my first cut. A jagged line, deep and reckless.

Tools of the Trade

People always ask what tools I use. Truth is — most of the time it’s just these:

• My hands
• A set of ancient wooden modeling tools
• A wire cutter
• An old screwdriver I refuse to retire
• A scalpel (for the fine stuff)
• A small blowtorch (for drama)

The Rough Form

Before long, a shape starts to emerge.
A lump becomes a suggestion. A suggestion becomes a figure.

Sometimes it fights you.
Sometimes it falls apart.

And sometimes… it just works.

The Frustration Phase

I won’t lie. Sculpting can be brutal.
I’ve smashed more than one piece against a wall when it refused to cooperate.

Like that one time:

That was the third piece I broke that week.

But I realized something:
Every time a piece shatters, you learn what it could have been.

A Study in Texture

This time, I decided to focus on texture over form.
Smooth. Jagged. Rippled. Pitted.

I pressed wire mesh into the clay. Dragged a fork across its surface. Smashed it with a rock I found outside.

The result was ugly.

And it was beautiful.

Lessons the Clay Taught Me

• Perfect symmetry is boring.
• Mistakes are portals to new forms.
• The best tool is often your thumb.
• Patience is a skill, not a virtue.
• Sculpting is physical philosophy.

I carved these words into the studio wall.

The Long Hours

There’s a strange thing that happens around Hour 7.

The world blurs.
The studio lights buzz.
The clay becomes an extension of your will.

I built towers. Broke them down. Built them again.
A thousand tiny iterations, like dreaming with your hands.

Final Form

And at the end of it all — you stop.

Not because it’s perfect.
Not because you’re finished.

Because it tells you it’s done.

It’s weird. It’s lumpy. It’s absolutely mine.

The Aftermath

Sculpting changes the way you see the world.

You start noticing the grain of a fencepost.
The curve of a bottle’s neck.
The way light slices across a cracked sidewalk.

You realize everything is sculpted.
Even you.

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Future Experiments

Next up on my brutalist hitlist:

• Concrete sculptures with embedded neon wire
• Abstract forms made from found metal scraps
• Carved polystyrene monuments (and setting them on fire)
• Digital sculpting with VR tools

If you made it this far — you’re part of this now.

Until Then…

Stay weird.
Stay brutal.
And keep making ugly, beautiful things.

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