Finding the Oasis emerged from a profound need for nature and healing. Having grown up in an environment surrounded by greenery, natural landscapes, and open space, I was accustomed to a constant connection with the outdoors. Nature always felt instinctive to me — something grounding, familiar, and necessary. During the period in which this work was conceived, however, I found myself disconnected from that environment. I had neither the freedom nor the means to travel, and daily commitments kept me confined within the city.
I found this separation deeply unsettling. The very place we come from — the birthplace of everything, the most natural environment for human existence — had become inaccessible to me. I felt an intense need to reconnect with the elements and disconnect from society in order to reconnect with myself. Water, in particular, had always been a source of calm. I was fascinated by the constantly shifting reflections and refractions of sunlight across its surface, and I longed to preserve that feeling; to bring it home with me and experience it whenever I needed comfort but could not access the real environment itself.
In response to this longing, I created a machine — a healing machine. Finding the Oasis is a sculptural installation that attempts to artificially recreate the therapeutic effects of nature. Just as the sea can wash away anxiety and restore a sense of stillness, this work invites the viewer to activate it and temporarily surrender to its calming properties. The sculpture functions both as an object and as a process: an engineered encounter with nature designed for an urban existence.
The piece acts as a continuation of, and response to, the film EcoThep, which explored the emotional and psychological effects of nature through moving image. While the film attempted to capture fleeting moments of healing found outdoors, Finding the Oasis pushes that idea further by trying to make nature immediate, portable, and endlessly accessible. It reflects on the manufactured landscapes we accept within contemporary city life — the small patch of green behind a home, the perfectly maintained football field, the decorative flowerbeds outside supermarkets — carefully engineered fragments of nature delivered to us in controlled doses.
The work ultimately explores adaptation and survival within artificial environments. If I could not return to my natural habitat, then I would adapt my habitat to meet my needs. By bending the natural world into an artificial process, the sculpture questions whether simulated encounters with nature can still provide genuine healing, and how far we are willing to engineer nature in order to cope with our growing distance from it.