de tuin / the garden (2025)

Constructed scrapped timber frame, paper scrap collage
Left & Right panels: 750x1700 mm, Centre panel: 1500x1700 mm

The Garden is constructed from the disposable present: magazines, advertising pamphlets, calendar, and the glossy detritus of daily consumption. From a slow, deliberate process of tearing and rearranging, the work functions as a physical intervention, the artist’s act of rending paper introduces a resistance and penance, turning the disposable visual noises into an architectural event, in an era defined by the frictionless, instant slide of a finger across a glass screen

The triptych format stems from the inquiry visualising faith and morality as the ultimate truth,  recalls Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. However, where Bosch follows the speculative theology of Dante’s Divine Comedy two centuries before him, mapped a moral framework of sin, judgment, and redemption, this work maps the aftermath of their collapse. Embodying the condition precipitated by Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God, the vertical hierarchy that once organised human meaning has been dismantled. In the new cartography, the frameworks of religious ideology and Foucault’s disciplinary structures have fallen and settled at the bottom of the canvas, forming a heavy sedimentary layer of obsolete syntax and arbitrary custom.

What rises from this debris is a terrifying abundance. The "chaos" ascending the panels suggests a displacement of the religious impulse. The human necessity for awe has been redirected. The bombardment of visuals, the encumbrance of impressions, and the relentless stream of data function as an sublime force. The Garden suggests that our capacity for worship has turned against us. We stare into the glowing abyss of the information feed. The work leaves us to question whether this overwhelming visual field is a liberation from old gods, or if the screen in our pocket has simply become the new, demanding altar of the everyday.