VARIATIONS ON INSULATION
During the Jan van Eyck Acdemie Residency
I have been researching insulation as both a material condition and a way to reflect on isolation and protection. Especially in moments of crisis, we tend to build thicker walls, seal borders more tightly and retreat further into the comfort of regulated interiors, but this instinct to insulate is not neutral. It's a political gesture and comfort itself is a relatively recent invention—an aesthetic, technological, and social construct that says something about how we imagine safety, control, and otherness.
The wooden sculptures in this space evoke fragments of construction: double walls, subfloor cavities, under-stair voids—spaces that usually remain hidden, technical, or residual. But here they are shaped in ways that suggest they could be inhabited physically or emotionally. Not fully, perhaps, but temporarily. Emotionally or by something or someone else. In that sense, they are not finished rooms, but spatial questions.
They are built by salvaged bed frames. Accompanying performance unfolds the stories of bees nesting in walls, heartbreaks, and houses awaiting demolition.
During the Jan van Eyck Acdemie Residency
I have been researching insulation as both a material condition and a way to reflect on isolation and protection. Especially in moments of crisis, we tend to build thicker walls, seal borders more tightly and retreat further into the comfort of regulated interiors, but this instinct to insulate is not neutral. It's a political gesture and comfort itself is a relatively recent invention—an aesthetic, technological, and social construct that says something about how we imagine safety, control, and otherness.
The wooden sculptures in this space evoke fragments of construction: double walls, subfloor cavities, under-stair voids—spaces that usually remain hidden, technical, or residual. But here they are shaped in ways that suggest they could be inhabited physically or emotionally. Not fully, perhaps, but temporarily. Emotionally or by something or someone else. In that sense, they are not finished rooms, but spatial questions.
They are built by salvaged bed frames. Accompanying performance unfolds the stories of bees nesting in walls, heartbreaks, and houses awaiting demolition.
