Praying Mantis Chair
by Joseph Santiago-Dieppa · Los Angeles, United States

I came to sculpture and design through painting, carrying with me a deep sensitivity to gesture, surface, and composition. That painterly sensibility stays close as I work in wood, metal, and other raw materials. Each piece feels like a canvas in space, where movement and material spark a kind of conversation. My practice is restless. I am interested in creating forms in which various identities and extremes coexist: dense and spare, industrial and handmade, rigid and relax, systematic and random. I test how far a line can stretch, how a plane might sag or split, how a form can breathe instead of stand frozen. Each project feels like an improvisation, guided by urgency and curiosity. I’m willing to let things feel unresolved or uneasy, trusting that tension to sharpen the work. It comes from a painter’s memory of color and touch — carried forward into three dimensions, always moving, always searching.