DDylan Gomez’s sculpture practice collaborates directly with the ever-changing land and sea, using hands-on processes to amplify their forms, patterns, and ecological rhythms. His work investigates time and landscape, understanding both as interconnected forces that shape the human experience. He views his role in art-making as a mediator between human-centered spaces and the natural world, offering new ways to perceive and experience trees, stones, waves, and other elemental forces that are often overlooked. Through processes such as hammering copper around basalt stones to record the memory of their form, or casting tidal patterns left in the sand with plaster molds, he translates nature’s visual voice through materials tied to extraction, industrialization, and technology—recontextualizing their meaning and function.

Raised in Hawaiʻi between urban Honolulu and the coastal, mountain landscapes of Kāneʻohe and Kahaluʻu, Gomez’s lived experiences have deeply informed his understanding of place. Witnessing the contrast between urban, human-dominated spaces and areas where coexistence with nature is possible has shaped his material choices and approach to art-making. As a Mexican-American artist in Hawaiʻi, he recognizes the responsibility of navigating his positioning by approaching the land and sea with care, listening, and respect to honor place.

At the core of his work is nurturing connection rather than extraction—rooted in biocentrism, Gomez positions his practice as one that meets the natural world through companionship and interdependence, rather than domination. His art-making process aims to foster dialogue with the natural world, creating spaces where nature’s visual language can be communicated in human-dominated environments. By investigating time as embedded in the landscape, his work records fragments of nature’s voice, conveying a sense of temporal depth beyond human grasp. These gestures remind us that we are part of a larger existence and challenge the current Western, anthropocentric framework.

“When you wake up, and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing.”
—Thích Nhất Hạnh