Grief Ramp 2025 is a monumental sculpture in the shape of a stunt

ramp, soaring across the gallery from floor to ceiling. Inspired by

the artist’s collaborator Matthew Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes

while blind, including his ambition to achieve the world’s highest jump.

The work literally and metaphorically (scaff)holds notions of trust,

protection, and transformation, as well as the dizzying heights of

neoliberal aspiration or the feeling of free falling.

What happens after the jump?

What will catch us?

Stefanou turns the sculpture into a living instrument as speakers

are placed within the scaffold, vibrating and pulsing to the

soundtrack of the accompanying film, You Can’t See Speed

2025. Rumbling along the ramp are the heavy industrial sounds

of dirt bikes and low frequencies merged with melismatic singing,

trumpets, and voice. A sensorium of abiotic, musical, and bodily

compositions.

A waterfall of hand-grown crystals cascade from the ramp’s peak,

crying collective tears of loss or yearning. Stefanou writes, ‘It is in

grief, in salty residues, that crystallisation begins’. Embedded with

ornamented evil eyes, Grief Ramp also acts as a totemic ribbon,

protecting against and warding off threats both imagined and

real. As Cassar becomes the evil eye totem in the film, Stefanou

transfers that protection from the screen to the space, fortifying all

of us within an embrace of metal, crystal, and sound.