Your large totemic work is very impressive. I found the layers in core samples fascinating simply because they formed a vertical record of a more often than not horizontal history. At times the vertical core took a sample through rocks that had been tilted from the horizontal and that was indeed fascinating. The whole lot seemed aesthetic but that's the reading we artists place on them. The way you describe what you are building into the forms you make takes them onto a metaphorical and subjective level which opens up the narration possibilities further --- it's making the structures personal on a thought-through and thoughtful level reaching that point where the initial source of inspiration is transformed and becomes more malleable. It is no longer rooted in just what it was. The strategy of making two objects (a double echo) and burying one in a location that provided the material, physical stuff that was used to make them is fascinating and for me is full of all manner of possibilities, it's something coming full circle and resonates kind of archeologically but with more built into it. Paradoxically what is built in is not only physically hidden by burial but strangely mute in the object so the mystery and uncertainty of narrative remains. Building personal narratives into art work --- well some see that as problematic and I suppose when something is top loaded with it and is so explicit (too much in the face or clouting you around the back of the head) for me at least it doesn't work. Thankfully your works have a much more subtle and compelling presence and much greater depth.
What you are working with is akin to sensing and creating relationships between those elements, both material, personal and conceptual that are constituents of your practice. That kind of mixture is complex in itself, not because it's a matter of making it such but because it is and we are quite capable of dealing with it intellectually and intuitively.
Hope all goes well with the MA --- I am sure it will and congratulations on your first born. +Take care and many thank for the pictures you sent through ---all the very best