What Remains

The camera pans across the room, capturing two adjacent spaces that, to me, resemble a mortuary. Plastic sheeting lines the floor and walls, suggesting both containment and preservation. Behind the translucent curtain, something is being examined. I’m alone confronted by the weight of dystopian sculptures, carefully placed, unapologetically confronting.

The exhibition brought together Dutch artist Folkert de Jong and British artist Tild Greene, who interrogated the paradox of preservation in a throwaway culture where objects, people, and histories are just as easily immortalised as they are discarded. Their sculptures speak to the environmental, cultural, and spiritual consequences of our time.

De Jong casts disposable and figurative objects: plastic cups, boxes, scale model ships, bits of detritus into enduring relics in bronze. These sculptures blur the line between the sacred and the discarded, becoming relics of late-capitalist life. Some resemble sunken shipwrecks or a car wheel resting on the ocean floor, objects once useful, now eroded and transformed. They appear overtaken by forms that evoke coral and marine organisms. The natural patina of bronze brings out turquoise hues and textures reminiscent of reef structures, as if alchemically altered by the sea.

One sculpture resembles a wrecked historic ship, an echo of colonial voyages that once set sail to conquer the so-called New World. Another, more industrial in form, resembles a cargo ship, today’s vessel of globalised trade, swollen with overproduction. A bronze chair stands elevated on a pedestal, crowned with a precarious tower of plastic cups, like a forgotten game. Frozen mid-collapse, the piece suggests to me a moment halted by catastrophe. An apocalypse occurred — and the game was never finished.

De Jong’s practice forces us to confront the unsettling permanence of what we consider ephemeral. The idea of value is destabilised. What happens when the disposable is cast in the material of monuments?

Tild Greene’s sculptural works draw inspiration from the peat industry that once shaped the landscape of Amsterdam-Noord, a practice that involved the large-scale extraction of peat for fuel, leaving behind drained wetlands and triggering long-term ecological degradation. The scars of this industry remain embedded in the soil: subsidence, loss of biodiversity, and altered hydrology that continue to affect the region. Greene reflects on this history by drawing formal parallels between the excavation of peat and the casting of bronze, both processes of extraction, transformation, and solidification.

In the series Toil, Greene deconstructs and reconfigures found materials like bicycle parts, a shovel, and a belt, objects that still echo their original use. The works speak of cycles of labour and endurance, attachment and detachment. Greene invites us to reflect on the interplay between human industry, environmental loss, and the struggle to adapt.

The atmosphere of the exhibition — industrial, cleared, and quietly charged — brings to mind the metaphysical terrain of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Like the film’s mysterious Zone, the exhibition space feels suspended between decay and transformation, haunted by the traces of past industry and future uncertainty. Stalker’s dissonance between the natural and the technological, the spiritual and the material, echoes through the fragile assemblages of the works on view. The sculptures, like the film’s protagonists, seem to navigate an unstable terrain — part shrine, part scrapyard — where familiar forms become unfamiliar, and every object holds the potential for transformation.

Just as Tarkovsky’s Zone blurs perception and reality, the works in this exhibition ask us to question what we see, what we remember, and what we’ve learnt to ignore. They tap into a quiet, enduring anxiety: about what we leave behind, what we destroy, and what we might still be able to repair. Like Stalker, this exhibition becomes a mirror of our desires, our waste, our fragility. What are the consequences of our times? How will future generations view the ruins of our present? And how, if at all, can we rewrite the narrative of what we value, and what we allow to decay?