DECAY WORKS (2016-Ongoing)

Decay Works explores transformation, impermanence, and the tension between beauty and decay. Through experimental processes, Herck allows materials to evolve rather than controlling their final form, creating a dialogue between matter, time, and the forces of nature.

Two opposing forces meet: light and darkness, beauty and decay, attraction and destruction. Neither dominates the other. Together, they create a continuous dance of opposing forces, held in a fragile balance.

This duality continues within the works themselves. Dinosaur bones, crushed and transformed into pigment, carry the weight of deep time, mortality, and impermanence. Gold, by contrast, evokes beauty, value, light, and endurance. What has decayed and what appears eternal exist together within the same work.

In this way, the work becomes a microcosm of a larger order: the cycles of creation and destruction, light and darkness, life and decay that operate in nature are mirrored within the material and within ourselves. As above, so below, as within, so without — the cosmic balance is reflected in the human and material scale.

The works ultimately ask whether beauty can exist without decay, and whether decay itself can become a form of beauty. What appears fragile may endure; what appears eternal may eventually transform.

© Text by Lara Van Oudernaarde.
© Photos by Tom Herck, Stijn Elshout and Erik Jamar.