Folie à Deux (2025) invokes the psychiatric term for the madness of one, transmitted to another (or others). It was made at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture, during the artists’ joint residency at NIROX, where they considered the human relationship to the earth as one of shared delusion or contagion. The work reflects on the uneasy continuum between reverence and domination that defines our contact with the living world. 

A single trunk of pale blackwood acacia stands on a base of red sandstone, found in the reserve adjoining NIROX. A sedimental stone characteristic of the region, it was formed from ancient ferruginous sands deposited over two billion years ago. Its layered folds evoke the movement of water long vanished from its surface, introducing a fleshy quality to a material usually regarded as hard and inert. The corporeal is equally reprised in the smooth, sinuous surface of the trunk, which emphasises the life of the tree over its utilitarian value. Its organic qualities contrast with the way the elements are joined: a radical interruption of the trunk at ‘waist’ height is achieved by a diagonal cut, secured by a wedge of darker wood. This cut follows the traditional carpentry technique of a scarf joint, held together by a wedge of weathered Zambezi teak. Driving the wedge in exerts pressure on the interior of the joint, stabilising the form along its length. Ordinarily, a scarf joint lengthens or reinforces two pieces end-to-end. Here, however, the cut introduces a subtle curvature and torsion, invoking the serpentine line and contrapposto of classical sculpture — gestures that once idealised the human form. The resulting movement suggests a feminine figure with its face turned towards the light. 

The sandstone has been selectively cut and polished to introduce assertive planes that define its intersection with the tree. It is an engineered meeting that contrasts with the slow, mutual adaptation of roots and rock — sculpturally pronounced and ecologically critical in the steep topography of alpine and subalpine landscapes. There, seedlings take hold in shallow crevices, germinating in microhabitats that offer shelter and constraint. Over time, the roots conform to and even penetrate the stone's irregularities, knitting tree and mountain together. This slow, symbiotic entanglement of organic persistence and mineral resistance creates stability on steep slopes threatened by erosion and gravity — a natural counterpoint to the deliberate, engineered joint of Folie à Deux.

The work's mechanical joining of “earth” to “tree” to “sky” is hopeful, if imperfect. Imitating nature’s own integrative processes, it is an attempt at belonging, enacted through artifice. This recalls the paradoxical concept of the “cut that connects” in Japanese aesthetics, known as kire. In this sense, the cut in Folie à Deux becomes both a wound of human interference and an articulation of relation.