Squish, Stretch, Break: Squishy Drifters
When I started Squishy Drifters, I knew I wanted to take a different path than creating a PFP collection. As the most dominant format in NFTs, PFPs cultivate digital identities and build connections within communities. While their clear structure and purpose are part of their strength, they also felt limiting for the kind of exploration I wanted to pursue. To me, there is still so much more to explore beyond PFPs—something that could express identity in a less direct, more abstract way.
That’s when I started to focus on cars. Cars, unlike faces, carry identity in a less direct but far more expansive way. They’re deeply tied to culture, place, and purpose—shifting in meaning depending on who’s behind the wheel or where they’re being driven. The Tokyo drifting scene became one of my main inspirations. There’s something raw about how those cars are transformed into extensions of their owners—hyper-personalized machines that reflect individuality but also belong to a larger, kinetic culture. Cars felt like the perfect medium to explore identity without being tied to faces or living forms.
Once I settled on cars, the challenge was figuring out how to approach them in a way that reflected my thinking and creative process. Most NFT collections rely on a straightforward layering system: a background, a body, and details like facial features or accessories to add personality. Of course, it can get more complex, but the sandwich system remains the same. Cars, however, offered an opportunity to rethink that structure entirely. What if the body wasn’t the foundation? What if I started with something completely different, like the wheels? That shift—from building up from a body to building outward from the wheels—unlocked my entire creative process. The wheels became the core, and everything else could be pushed, pulled, or wrapped around them in ways that broke from the traditional form of a car.
Starting with the wheels allowed me to take a Lambo, for instance, and stretch its body into something exaggerated and surreal. I could wrap it in a hamburger or compress it into a squishy, abstracted version of itself. This wasn’t about following an established formula but reimagining what a car could be while keeping it recognizable. The “squishiness” introduced a malleability to a form that’s usually rigid and mechanical.
The deeper I got into the process, the more I appreciated the freedom this approach gave me. The cars were designed to stretch straight up into banners for Twitter, making the collection a hidden banner series without explicitly branding it that way. This nuance in the design became a cornerstone of Squishy Drifters, encouraging me to think about how an image in NFTs can be flexible for its use—like adapting into a banner, high format to stand out better on a timeline, and, of course as a print.
Throughout this process, I often felt like I was unlearning everything ingrained in me during art school and reinforced in the art world. In school, you’re taught strict frameworks: how to build artistic concepts, use references “appropriately,” and create work that fits into predefined categories of what art should be. Moving into the art world, those frameworks evolve into unspoken rules—what you can and can’t do, what’s considered serious or acceptable, and, especially nowadays, how to stay aligned with politically correct expectations. With Squishy Drifters, I left all of that behind. When I felt unsure or insecure about whether it was okay to use a particular layer, I just did it. If layering chaotic elements until the car disappeared didn’t make sense anymore, I did it. Some pieces became so abstract they no longer resembled cars at all—but that was the point. Experimentation wasn’t just a step in the process; it was the process itself.
I created over 1,200 traits across 18 layers, including 33 unique 1-of-1s for a supply of 3,333. Whenever I thought I’d reached a stopping point, I felt compelled to add more—another layer, another variation, another way of seeing these forms. By the end, it felt like I had vomited everything inside me into the project. It was exhausting, almost overwhelming, but also the most precise reflection of how far I was willing to push myself.
One of the inspirations that profoundly influenced me during this process was the car paintings of Andreas Schulze. His vehicles are strange and humorous, yet they feel softer and more human than cars in real life. He transforms something as mundane as a car into a poetic, almost surreal experience. That’s the quality I wanted to reflect in Squishy Drifters. Schulze’s work reminded me that even the most familiar objects can be completely reimagined, their forms stretched and reshaped into something entirely unexpected.
Squishy Drifters became a way to rethink my creative process and, more importantly, to understand how I want to define myself as an artist in this space. It allowed me to challenge the boundaries of what a collection could be, pushing beyond traditional expectations while staying true to my vision. Through this process, I’ve explored new ideas and laid a foundation for how I want to approach my future work.
