Tsjusterboksem, 1998-2026 focuses on disintegration through the architecture of my hometown, Donkerbroek.

The project began with a question that has followed me throughout my artistic practice: what happens when a sculpture is finished?

Every time I completed a work, I experienced a sense of discomfort. Once a sculpture became fixed and solid, it seemed to lose something essential. Poetically speaking, it felt as though I had given birth to an entity only to immediately rob it of its ability to change.

For me, a finished sculpture became a dead sculpture.

Eventually, I found the movement I had been searching for through disintegration. I began placing clay sculptures in water, allowing them to slowly collapse back into their original material. Instead of marking an end, disintegration became a continuation of the work. The sculpture remained active, changing beyond the moment I had finished making it.

This interest resurfaced while working on the artwork for Vanity Box's album Sudden Loud Sounds in a Capital City. Together we decided to recreate the skyline of Donkerbroek, focusing on the church, the former milk factory, and the restaurant that define the village. While sculpting these buildings, I realized that Donkerbroek itself had become the subject I wanted to explore for my graduation project.

Looking back through earlier works, I found a series of experiments in which replicas of Donkerbroek had already been left to disintegrate. The connection had been there all along, although I hadn't yet understood it.

Tsjusterboksem, 1998–2026 brought these threads together, using the gradual disintegration of Donkerbroek as a way of asking what a sculpture can become once it is allowed to continue changing.