Embodied Practice

In 2021, I began creating something I had never seen before: rope sculptures without bodies. Shibari patterns frozen in space, holding only air and memory. I was thrilled with what emerged — these sculptural forms felt entirely new to me, a way of seeing rope I hadn’t encountered in my years of practice. Only in 2025, shortly after sharing the first images publicly, did someone point out that a Belgian artist named Shadow had explored remarkably similar ideas back in 2011. Two artists, separated by time and geography, arriving at the same visual language independently. This moment of humility became the starting point for a deeper question:

What does it mean to create in a practice where ideas flow like water — where lineage matters deeply, but ownership feels impossible?

The Paradox of Ownership in Shibari

In the international rope scene, debates have long raged over who can “own” ideas, techniques, styles, or images. Some ties are so distinctive they can be immediately attributed to a specific person, school, or style — sometimes even bearing that person’s name. But here’s the fundamental question:

Can rope as an art form even be owned at all?
Could a harness ever be patented?

My earliest rope sculptures — the ones shown here — are a perfect example of this tension. Anyone deeply immersed in the craft can instantly recognize the stylistic origins of each piece. They carry visible lineage, echoes of teachers and traditions that shaped my hands. I learned these forms through transmission — through watching, being tied, tying others, attending workshops, studying with teachers who themselves learned from teachers. The knowledge lives in my hands because it passed through other hands first. So when I create a sculpture based on these forms, what am I creating? Something entirely new? Or something that carries the weight of everyone who came before?

The Body as Essential Element

If we take the idea of “intellectual property” in rope seriously and strip it to its core, what becomes of the work when the body is removed? Does rope, in the absence of a body, automatically become art? Or is what remains merely the residue of an act that once unfolded upon skin, breath, sensation? And if the imprint remains on the body instead — in marks, in sensation, in memory — is the rope work incomplete without it?

Traces That Cannot Be Patented

Those who have been tied in an intense session rarely seek to recreate it for the sake of wearing a “fashionable” art form on their skin. What they return to are the traces — visible and invisible — left by the rope. These traces anchor memory. They offer clues to an experience that cannot be fully captured in words, and certainly cannot be patented. The rope leaves its mark. The body holds the memory. Neither can be owned.

When I create these sculptures, I’m freezing a moment that is usually ephemeral. The body is absent, but its shell remains — in the curve of the rope, in the tension held by the knots, in the negative space that suggests weight and breath.

From Legacy to Commodification

In art and rope practice, there is often a desire to honor legacy — to acknowledge where knowledge comes from, to recognize teachers, influences, and the countless hands that shaped a form. Yet in a capitalist framework, these same impulses are often distorted. The wish to honor and preserve can become a drive for ownership: intellectual property, trademarks, certifications. Labor and craft are assigned purely monetary value, and ideas are enclosed and protected as if they were commodities. What begins as recognition of influence can turn into claims of possession.
And in this process, many voices vanish. The subtle contributions of countless makers — teachers, peers, uncredited hands — are flattened, anonymized, or forgotten. Only a few “recognized” names remain — the trademarks, if you will — attached to works that are inherently collaborative.

Living in the Tension

It is precisely in this field of tension — between legacy and commodification, acknowledgment and ownership — that we operate. Fairness and justice in art cannot be reduced to legal claims or certifications. They live instead in dialogue, transparency, and co-creation. This is why I credit the lineages of my rope sculptures explicitly (to the best of my knowledge). Not because I’m required to, but because it matters. These forms didn’t spring fully formed from my imagination — they carry the DNA of specific teaching lineages, specific approaches to the body, specific philosophies of rope. To name that lineage is not to diminish my work. It’s to place it in context, in conversation, in community.

Ideas as Currents in a Shared Sea

When I discovered Shadow’s “Invisible Bunnies” from 2011, I recognized. Here was someone else asking the same questions I was asking: What is rope without the body? Can these forms stand alone? What do they communicate in their absence? Ideas emerge in different places, often at the same time, often independently of one another. Two artists, separated by time and space, can still arrive at a similar visual language — and therein lies the beauty.

Perhaps the most beautiful thing about art is not to own something, but to be part of a story that is bigger than ourselves. Ideas are not private islands. They are currents in a shared sea. When we create, we’re not pulling ideas from a void — we’re responding to what’s around us, what we’ve learned, what we’ve felt, what others before us have already begun to articulate.