Meet the artist behind Altūm.

My name is Kalani Wijewardana. I was born in Sri Lanka, and my family migrated to Melbourne when I was young. Growing up I always had an eye for how things looked: proportion, colour, what worked and what didn't. But I never pursued it. I had the attraction without the courage, which I suspect is a common story.

The turning point came during Melbourne's COVID lockdowns, which were some of the longest in the world. Our little lockdown bubble was looking for something to do. We couldn't go anywhere, but we wanted the time to count for something. So we built an installation together: a dimensional piece, made by hand. It was the first time I had made something with real relief, something that could never be repeated, and making it gave those months a sense of purpose. When my family moved to Singapore during the tail end of COVID, the piece was too fragile to travel. It stayed behind, but it never left my mind.

In Singapore we lived opposite ION Orchard, and almost every room in our apartment looked onto it. I saw that building at every hour: waking up, through the afternoon, late at night. I became fascinated by how much it changed depending on how the light hit it. It was never the same building twice. I kept thinking: how do you capture that and bring it inside, into a home? Not an image of it. The behaviour itself. That question is where Altūm comes from.

The other thread is what I am drawn to aesthetically: brutalist architecture, engineered precision, minimalism. I find real beauty in engineering excellence. But I am equally influenced by Yohji Yamamoto, who distrusts perfect surfaces because they can erase the person who made them. I am drawn to the flaws as much as the perfection; the edges you cannot get from a machine; organic irregularity inside precision engineering. That's where my work lives.