Commissioned by Bristol City Council as part of the 70th anniversary of the twinning between Bristol and Hannover, this work responds to a city shaped by destruction, reconstruction, and the loss of material identity.

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Much of Hannover’s historic timber-framed architecture was erased during the Second World War, replaced by post-war concrete modernism. In contrast, the nearby town of Celle, largely untouched, retains its intricate Fachwerkhäuser, offering a glimpse into a lost architectural language of wood, ornament, and inscription.

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While studying these carved facades, I used digital translation tools to decode the engraved beams, revealing records of authorship, construction, and repair. Yet as I stepped back, the technology began to fail. Architectural forms, shadows, and branches were misread as language, producing a stream of fractured, speculative text. This moment of glitch became the work’s foundation.

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A video of these distortions was analysed frame by frame, extracting recurring nouns that were then used as instructions for sculptural production. Language collapsed into material; misreading became method. Timber-both subject and source was reworked into a series of objects shaped by error, translation, and interpretation.

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Displayed in dialogue with the moving image, the sculptures sit before the glitching architecture that generated them—tracing a feedback loop between history, technology, and making.

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Photography by Paul Samuel White and Ruth Piper