Rohling (Crude Devices) reimagines the smartphone as a sculptural pre-form — a rohling, a blank caught between raw material and functional device. Each object in the series is made entirely from one of the natural resources that enable our digital infrastructure: copper, aluminium, salt, lithium, quartz, and oil. Rather than serving as invisible components within batteries, screens, or circuitry, these materials become the whole body of the object itself.

Some of the phone-shaped objects are carved from raw mineral rocks or ores which the artist has sourced directly from mines of critical importance to the industry, including the Serrabal quartz mine in Portugal, from where the most advanced silicon chips are made and the Khewra mine in Pakistan, which supplies a large percentage of the world’s salt. Others are carved or cast from refined – and therefore more pure – materials such as copper and aluminium, which are usually processed in China and impossible to trace back to any particular source. As Ed Conway, author of Material World, observes:

» most of the world's copper plates and bars and wires are a cocktail of atoms from all over the world: a bit from Chile, a bit from Australia, some from Indonesia, some from Democratic Republic of Congo, some recycled from copper mined long ago somewhere else altogether. Each slab is a physical manifestation of globalisation. «

The works return technological culture to its geological and tactile origins. Hand-carved and cast, they replace the seamlessness of the “smart” object with the weight, texture, and irregularity of the earth from which it is drawn. In accompanying videos, the artist performs the familiar gestures of swiping and scrolling on these inoperative forms, underscoring the strange intimacy between human touch and the extractive systems that sustain our devices.

As a title, Rohling (Crude Devices) joins two vocabularies: the workshop term for an unfinished casting, and the industrial language of the unrefined. Together they articulate the tension the works expose — between process and product, matter and information, the hand and the screen.