The artist's process usually begins quite pragmatically with the consideration of the object's requirements - its dimensions, weight, material, stability and the way it will be handled or used. Once those parameters are established, Jooste will try to dismantle the object from its functional constraints. "I work intuitively, rearranging, stretching, cutting, repeating and scattering volumes until the object begins to take on associations that I didn’t necessarily anticipate at the beginning. A lot of the process involves moving back and forth between control and accident. I tend to work through many small iterations rather than beginning with a completely resolved image of the final object. I’m interested in reaching a point where the form isn’t mimetic or designed to represent something specific, but it can feel reminiscent of many different things at once."

As the artist wanted to make something that was genuinely functional, weight and stability were important from the beginning, and so bronze became a natural material due to its density. This allows a relatively small object to perform that function very effectively. From that functional starting point, the forms began to develop through references to both architecture and landscape. This includes tessellated and stratified rock formations, and Gothic architectural structures - particularly the repetition, verticality and stepped profiles of buttresses, towers and ruins. These influences sit somewhere in the background of the work, so the objects might read differently depending on the viewer.

The casting patterns were developed through repeated modelling and iterative manipulation. Volumes were duplicated, shifted, cut and softened to create the stepped, eroded profiles. The final objects are sand-cast in bronze. Both the casting and polishing processes involve an element of risk. The casting introduces subtle surface irregularities that challenge the precision of the digital model, while polishing requires a careful judgement about how much skin to remove. Jooste was interested in removing the casting skin selectively, using polishing to highlight the edges and ridges and articulate the contours of the form, rather than creating an overall glossy finish. The challenge, as in all acts of making, is knowing when to stop.