Art as a response to destruction
Sculptures: Hilde Vleugels
Photography and design: Bruno Van den Bosch
This online exhibition is a shared response to loss, change and love for the
world that surrounds us.
Affected prickly pear cacti – dying out due to a new variant all-destroying aphid – form
the starting point.
Hilde tries to preserve some of the plants as sculpture, by removing the heavily infected parts
removing and strengthening and revealing the remaining forms with boat varnish, resin, pigments
and acrylic paint. The process is both preserving and creative: a form of mourning as well as transformation.
Bruno follows this closely. His photography and design of this exhibition do not function
as registration: it is a poetic response to what resonates.
This creates a visual diptych about finitude and attention: an ode to what dies, as well as to what
becomes visible if you dare to look.
“…It is not a story we made but something
that was there and is there in the traces of ditches
and uprights and long-extinguished wood fires.
It only needed to be found…”
Esther Jansma
Beauty of the soul 