Before the interview began, Luna Palazzolo-Daboul sent her interviewer a box of cement beads. Made one by one in exhaustive repetition, they differ in colour and texture — dusty grey, almost black, shiny-soft, uncomfortably rough — and they are surprisingly light. That tension, between a punishing material and a delicate result, runs through the sculptor's practice, as she described it in a BOMB interview published on 26 October.

The beads are strung on wires, hung from rings, shaped into hearts, or draped across seven feet of upright galvanised piping. In one work, The will attached to some obligation and a bad desire (2026), concrete, galvanised pipe and wire combine into a piece 92 by 49 by 79 inches. Bricks, too, are pressed into service: formed into womb-like circles or tomb-like shards and adorned with swans or stained glass. Palazzolo-Daboul chooses her materials both for what they demand of her and for how accessible they are, working with the tools and mechanisms of labour on her own terms.

Repetition, in her account, becomes devotion — a sacramental choice deliberately lifted out of the systems that usually enforce it. She describes herself, inaccurately according to her interviewer, as a bad poet, and admits she cannot bear the touch of cement itself. Yet the work finds warmth inside that discomfort: the quiet of a room filled with towering metal forms, and the sensuality of five feet of beaded cement hung over a galvanised spike and pooling at her feet.