A yearlong discipline of building one small sculpture per day in his Milton home studio has carried Damien Hoar de Galvan from a local artist's routine to international gallery walls.

Hoar de Galvan began the project in January 2024, gluing and painting scraps of reclaimed wood into miniature assemblages each morning. By December he had 362 pieces, just four short of the leap-year total after a trip to Barcelona interrupted the streak.

"I thought it would be a good way to change up how I was making things, new materials, work faster, etc.," Hoar de Galvan told Colossal, adding that raising a teenage daughter during COVID had challenged his creative process.

He had no plan to exhibit the collection.

That changed when ICA Boston assistant curator Tessa Bachi Haas visited his studio, and the museum selected him as one of four recipients of the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize, announced Feb. 20, 2025. The resulting exhibition, titled I don't think I'm ever gonna figure it out after an Elliott Smith song, displayed all 362 sculptures on five long shelves in the Fotene Demoulas Gallery from Aug. 28, 2025, through Jan. 19, 2026.

Now the work is traveling. A piece appeared at Art Fair Tokyo March 12–15, 2026, marking Hoar de Galvan's first showing in Japan, at Booth N001. He is preparing additional exhibitions at Tokyo's Gallery Side2 and at Gallery Naga in Boston, where he is represented. He was also selected as a 2026 artist-in-residence at Twenty Summers in Provincetown.

Much of the wood carries family history. Some comes from Hoar de Galvan's years as a preparator at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln; other pieces date to his father's carpentry projects, begun in the 1970s after emigrating from Argentina. He rarely sketches before building, instead selecting a shape or color and letting the piece evolve.

Each sculpture stands just a few inches tall, with vibrant fragments fanned into pointed geometries and radial lines that sweep outward like a starburst.

Hoar de Galvan has worked in painted wood sculpture for nearly 20 years, according to ICA Boston, and has shown in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and across Massachusetts. He plans to incorporate recycled wood from ICA installations into new works.

What's next: Hoar de Galvan's Twenty Summers residency in Provincetown is underway this year. Solo exhibitions at Gallery Side2 in Tokyo and Gallery Naga in Boston are forthcoming; specific dates have not been announced.