The first time I held a sheet of copper, I wasn’t thinking about commodity markets. I was thinking about possibility.
When I later learned to weld, I became captivated by something that still fascinates me today. I watched a flat sheet of metal gradually become something entirely new – not because the copper itself had changed, but because I had imagined something new for it. Looking back, I had no idea that one sheet of copper, and the many sheets used thereafter, would eventually alter the way I thought about value itself.
My career has taken me through finance, enterprise technology, and now fine art. On paper, those worlds don’t seemto have much in common.Yet when I look back, I see a common thread running through all three and found myself returning to the same question:
How does a material create value throughout its lifetime?
Most conversations about critical materials naturally begin at the start of the supply chain. We talk about exploration,extraction, refining, and manufacturing because those stages determine whether the materials our economies depend on are available in the first place. My own perspective begins further downstream, after a material reaches the hands of the people who imagine what it might become.
As I’ve worked with copper, brass, steel, and many rare and precious metals over the years, I’ve come to think about this process as The Value Journey.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that every stage of this journey creates opportunities for innovation, differentiation, and entirely new forms of value.
Copper has value the moment it comes out of the ground. That much is obvious. What fascinates me is that its storydoesn’t end there. As it moves through human hands, engineers transform it into infrastructure. Designers shape how people experience it. Entrepreneurs discover new markets for it. Artists invite us to see it differently. Each contributes something unique, yet together they expand what the material is capable of becoming.The copper itself hadn’t changed. What had changed was the meaning people found in it and the possibilities they saw within it.
I’ve come to think of that journey in three parts: Material. Human Ingenuity. Legacy.
The material provides the foundation. Human ingenuity expands what that material can become. Legacy is what remains after the object has entered people’s lives and taken on meaning beyond its original function.
This way of thinking was influenced, in part, by Michael Porter’s value chain. His work transformed how businesses think about creating value within an organization. My curiosity begins where that framework naturally ends. I’m interested in how value continues to evolve after a material leaves the factory. Once it enters homes, cities,workplaces, and public spaces, it begins another chapter that is shaped by people rather than production.
We see this throughout the economy. Luxury brands often begin with materials that are widely available, yet exceptional craftsmanship, thoughtful design, and years of earned trust create products that people value very differently. In technology, physical materials become more valuable when paired with software, data, and intellectualproperty. The material itself matters, but it is only one part of the equation.
Working as a sculptor has given me the opportunity to witness this transformation firsthand. Every sculpture I create begins as sheets of copper, brass, and steel. The intrinsic value of those materials never disappears, but by the time afinished piece enters a collector’s home or a public exhibition, people rarely talk about the metal itself. They talk about what it represents.
Watching sculptures I created from metal eventually be exhibited at the Louvre Museum in Paris made me realize that the material had traveled much farther than I ever imagined. Physically, it had crossed an ocean. Conceptually, it had journeyed from raw material to craftsmanship, and ultimately into a cultural conversation. The copper hadn’t become more valuable because it had changed. It had become more valuable because people continued to discover new andupdated possibilities within it.
That realization has influenced the way I think about innovation. We often associate innovation with discovering newmaterials or developing more advanced technologies. Those advances are undeniably important. But innovation can also come from discovering new possibilities within materials we already know well. Sometimes the greatest opportunity isn’t changing the material itself, but expanding what it enables us to create.
As demand for critical materials continues to grow, discussions around responsible sourcing, resilient supply chains,and advanced manufacturing will remain essential. At the same time, I wonder if there is another conversation worth having alongside them. How might we intentionally create more forms of value from the materials already in our hands? Not only economic value, but functional, cultural, and ultimately lasting value.
The metals themselves may remain unchanged.
What changes is our imagination, our ingenuity, and ultimately, what we choose to build with them.
