Still life
Still life extends beyond the depiction of simple objects, serving as a profound expression of emotion and meaning. In my practice, I often use the garden as a vivid example of the collision between the natural and the artificial. For human beings, the garden is a man-made Eden—a symbiotic space that accommodates both our idea of nature and the ways in which we are able to modify it.
It is, quite literally, terra incognita: a space in which one can create according to one’s own will, shape a process, and witness its outcome. Here, creation can be understood in both physical and conceptual terms.
In a sense, a bouquet is a concentrated version of a garden, an embodiment of the gardener’s labor. At the same time, the life of a bouquet is remarkably brief. Seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings, with their vanitas—the vanity of vanities—remind us of life’s transience and call us toward moderation and spirituality through the symbolism of everyday objects and plants.
I draw on the aesthetic structure of Dutch still-life painting, its meditation on the fleeting nature of time, and its tension between reason and desire, but I do not assign a symbolic meaning to every individual object. What matters to me is the figure of the gardener, invisible to the viewer. The gardener is the force that allows the garden and the bouquet to exist, and it is through the gardener’s decisions that a reasonable balance may—or may not—be achieved.
Still life with Flowers and a Tomato.
Ceramics, stoneware glaze,
98x69x10 cm, 2025
