My Tokens series emerges from years of documenting cryptic marks—graffiti, marginalia, urban signage—discovered on city surfaces and within found books worldwide. These minimal sculptures give physical form to humanity's persistent urge to mark and communicate.

Drawing from my archive of photographed and sketched markings, I transform two-dimensional expressions into three-dimensional objects, asking viewers to reconsider the anonymous human communication we encounter and largely ignore daily.

The work is deeply informed by paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger's discovery that Ice Age cave artists used a consistent vocabulary of 32 geometric symbols across Europe over 30,000 years—dots, lines, spirals, hand stencils—humanity's oldest known acts of creative expression. This ancient symbolic language connects directly to today's urban marks, revealing continuities in how humans claim space and transmit meaning.

My multidisciplinary practice rejects boundaries between art, design, and craft. Years of creating iconic symbols as a graphic designer inform this investigation into mark-making's primal power. Tokens finds artistic beauty in these humble forms while revealing their creative potential, connecting cave painters to contemporary taggers in an unbroken chain of human expression.