Jan Hüskes - Untitled (cloud chamber 6 & 7) (2023)

Flowing, traditional woodcarving, combined with weathered construction material that appears to have been salvaged from a river or a decaying building, textiles, rope, foam: the composite sculptures of Jan Hüskes (b. 1991, lives in Brussels and Düsseldorf) frequently possess a quiet monumentality in which both tension and dynamism are contained.

The sculpture Hüskes created for Lustwarande consists of two overlapping elements in which the form is derived from supermarket checkouts, specifically the kind with a conveyor belt. In his choice of material, the artist is inspired by subjects including old wooden houses in the countryside that blend into the landscape. From an anthropocentric point of view – in which human beings are seen as the measure of things – the sculpture may look familiar as an item of furniture, while also evoking associations with a bungalow or pavilion, which in this case would provide shelter only for small animals and objects at most. Hüskes himself makes a comparison to a form of miniature architecture, such as small wayside chapels that, like his sculpture, have been erected along roads and footpaths as places for prayer or remembrance.

Untitled (cloud chamber 6 & 7) developed out of a process in which the forms are precisely formulated in advance but, in Hüskes’s words, serve as a skeleton that is filled in and stacked up, step by step, with the precise elements depending on what is revealed during the process. This sculpture is characterised by a more architectural construction than Hüskes’s previous work. By alluding to the interdependence of different worlds – from the human consumer landscape, which is becoming less and less human, and the changing landscape beyond, to change, decay, and religion in a more general sense – this work adds a tantalising perspective from which to view the themes in Eartheaters.