Daniel Cosentino’s sculptural work investigates the unseen architectures that underpin human experience: structures we inherit, rely on, and embody, yet seldom notice. These works began as a meditation on silence, evolving into an exploration of form, presence, and the material language of memory. Often resembling anatomical elements, especially bones, the sculptures feel both essential and elusive, quiet frameworks that support without demanding attention.
Constructed from layered PETG, PLA plastics, laser-cut acrylic, and hand-stained wood, each piece merges organic suggestion with synthetic process. Text is sometimes embedded into the forms, at times clearly visible, at other times eroded, obscured, or residual. These inscriptions evoke private languages or cultural traces just out of reach.
These sculptures began as a way for me to understand what sits beneath the surface of things. I think of them as bone forms—not just in name, but in the way they feel essential and hidden. Bones hold us up, but we rarely see them. They are quiet and absolute. That quality of being necessary but unseen is something I come back to again and again in my work. It is how I understand the self, too: not as something we simply perform, but as something shaped and manufactured through inheritance.
I build these forms using a mix of materials. Most are 3D-printed in plastics like PLA and PETG, then layered with laser-cut acrylic and chemically welded into place. They rest on hand-stained wooden plinths that are integral to each piece. The materials and colors shift depending on what I am trying to say, but the intention is always to bring together the organic and the synthetic. I want the works to feel familiar and unfamiliar at once—like fossils from the material world and the world of thought and memory.
Often, there is text inside the work. Sometimes it is visible. Sometimes it is embedded so deeply that only a suggestion remains. I see these texts not as labels or explanations but as part of the object itself. They are the bones of language, or maybe the residue of thought. They point inward—toward memory, belief, and things that hold shape but cannot be fully spoken.
These sculptures are part of a larger exploration of form. The series evolves: some works transition into very different structures or into the realm of land art. When installed outdoors, the materials weather and begin to settle into the ground. They take on a different kind of life. But even then, they remain what they are: fragments of a structure, pieces of a language, objects left behind or waiting to be uncovered.
What keeps me working in this way is the sense that there is always something underneath. The original impulse came from thinking about silence, and that slowly turned into a way of exploring physicality. These pieces are my way of staying with that thought. They are forms I keep returning to—and maybe they’re doing the same. They carry something for me. Perhaps they will for others too.
