Rooted in his experience as the child of a profoundly deaf father and a deaf-blind mother, Malcolm Koch’s tactile approach reflects the sensory-adapted ways he learned to navigate the world. His contemporary practice is a lifelong inquiry into nature, exploring structural form, material stress, and how physical forces leave an enduring mark.

Rather than relying on visual observation, Koch collaborates with the natural behaviour of his media. He manipulates linen, synthetic membrane, and copper in severely curved or coiled states—painting, cutting, drilling, scraping, heating, and chemically transforming the material.

Since 2004, he has developed this methodology as Membrane Art; an enduring fixation is the transition from curvature to flat. For Koch, the final artwork is the memory of the curve made tangible—a two-dimensional map of three-dimensional events that reveals how nature stores, resolves, and remembers tension.