Over the last ten years, Handiwirman Saputra has created a series of enigmatic sculptures and paintings entitled No Roots, No Shoots, triggered by random objects he has found in everyday life. The impetus for some of these works was a stretch of river near his home, where exposed roots of bamboo groves and trees were entangled with household rubbish. Saputra was intrigued not just by the things he discovered there but by the associations between them: “Perhaps they could also be said to build conversation, dialogue about the experience of that thing – what it had been used for from its origins up to the point that I found it”.
