Vorm van groei

Artist Statement

My work explores how forms emerge through repetition, accumulation, and transformation. Working primarily with ceramics, I create sculptures that move between the organic, the animal, the geological, and the imaginary.

For many years, my practice focused on creating autonomous sculptural works, often built from hundreds or thousands of repeated elements. Works such as dogs, rabbits, and octopuses are constructed through labor-intensive processes in which pattern, texture, and structure become integral to the identity of the form. Repetition is not merely a visual strategy; it is a way of understanding how complex forms can grow from simple actions.

Alongside these larger sculptures, I periodically enter phases of experimentation in which I deliberately move away from familiar approaches. These periods are driven by curiosity rather than a predetermined outcome. I drip, spray, stack, build, and manipulate clay in ways that often lead to unexpected results and, just as often, to failure. Rather than seeing these experiments as separate from my practice, I regard them as an essential part of it.

My recent project, Shape of Growth (Vorm van groei), emerged from one of these exploratory phases. What began as material research gradually developed into a body of work with its own visual language. Inspired by processes such as mineral accretion, sedimentation, erosion, and cave formation, the sculptures appear to exist in a continuous state of becoming. They evoke fossils, organisms, geological formations, and unknown life forms without fully belonging to any category.

Within the installation, a dialogue emerges between light, porous, limestone-like structures and darker, earthbound forms. These contrasting appearances suggest different manifestations of the same generative forces. Like natural processes unfolding above and below the surface, the works reveal multiple expressions of growth, transformation, and decay.

What interests me most is the moment when an experiment stops functioning as preparation for a future work and begins to claim its own autonomy. Shape of Growth occupies that space. The project has challenged my assumptions about what my sculptures can be and has shifted my focus from representing forms toward investigating the processes through which forms come into existence.

I see nature not as a subject but as a continuous process of formation and change. Through ceramic sculpture, I seek to create spaces of wonder and curiosity, inviting viewers to reflect on the forces that shape both the visible world and the forms that have yet to emerge.