April 2026

I am a shape maker — and an unmaker of shapes.

My work begins with form: the curve of a canyon wall, the rhythm of water over stone, the architecture of a seed pod or a storm system. From metal, hardwood, stone, polymer, and paper, I build dimensional objects that carry these observations — then I open them up. Through holes, gaps, and perforations, I excavate the solid until what remains is held in tension between presence and absence, structure and dissolution.

The circle is my most persistent tool. Round, drilled holes appear throughout my work — in the layered bastions and ramparts, the delicate orchis forms, the shadow spheres that shift with every angle of light — and their significance is both deeply personal and endlessly open. As a child, I was transfixed by my grandfather's 1950s Millers Falls hand-powered drill. I drilled hole after hole into his wooden workbench until I was eventually redirected to spare blocks of wood. Something about that act — breaking through a surface, letting light into a place that had never seen it, uncovering the hidden world inside a material — took hold of me and never let go.

That obsession now drives work that spans intimate pedestal pieces and large-scale architectural installations, wall-mounted reliefs and suspended forms, wood and metal and stone. Across all of it, the holes are not merely decorative. They are structural. They redefine the solidity of the objects they inhabit, casting shadows that move as the viewer moves, creating interior worlds that reward close looking. In works like the Shadow Sphere series or the Orchis sculptures, the perforations are the piece — the remaining material simply gives them a place to live.

My sculptures embody a productive paradox: they are made by removing. Solid forms become canvases; holes and gaps become brushstrokes. I have come to think of this not as destruction but as a different kind of construction — one that asks how much can be taken away before a thing ceases to hold, and what new thing comes into being in the space left behind.

After more than a decade as a structural engineer, I understand that question from both sides. Engineering asks form to follow function. My sculptures invert that entirely. They are form-driven structures that willingly sacrifice function — that embrace porosity, lightness, and even apparent fragility — in pursuit of something that holds the eye the way a gap in a forest canopy holds light.

I still travel to wild and remote places. I still come back changed. And I still return to the studio to work out what I saw — in the quiet language of material, form, and the space between.

Thank You,
Michael Enn Sirvet

A Hole Moot: https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil375/Lewis1.pdf.