Daniel
Lopez Lomeli

Daniel López Lomelí is a multidisciplinary artist born in Mexico City and currently based in the Blue Mountains, Australia. With a background in architecture, the space where he first witnessed the vast scale of material waste, particularly plastics. Fascinated by their overlooked potential, he began collecting discarded polymers such as polyethylene terephthalate amongst many others to transform into sculptural works that question our relationship to plastic and its perceived disposability. In his hands, plastic becomes something dynamic: a gesture frozen in time, shaped through controlled heat and fire into forms that mimic weighty materials or emphasize the raw honesty of transformation.
Central to his practice is a reverence for material memory and a deepening sense of ecological interconnectedness. Drawing from the Japanese concept of Kodama—spirits that inhabit trees, forests, and mountains—López Lomelí expands the idea to include plastic: an omnipresent material born of fossilized life, decayed over millennia, now shaping the rhythms of our daily existence. His sculptures embody what Donna Haraway terms the "Chthulucene"—a call for more curious, caring, and creative ways of living within our damaged world.
Imbalance, for López Lomelí, is truthful. His asymmetrical forms celebrate imperfection as a form of equilibrium, reflecting a belief that we relate most deeply to the flawed, the broken, and the unfinished. Through these works, he invites viewers to reconsider value, origin, and agency—not as fixed, but as ever-evolving.
Working across sculpture, installation, projection, and collective making, his recent projects investigate themes of transformation, identity, and time. 
In 2024, he was awarded the Casula Powerhouse Scholarship, which includes a forthcoming exhibition integrating his sculptural language with the site’s architecture.