STILETTO (2017-Ongoing)
The Stiletto Series, directly linked to Tom Herck’s Holy Cow installation, continues his exploration of life, death, and impermanence through the use of explicit symbols—most notably the cow skull.

Each piece features an actual cow skull, referencing Holy Cow and symbolizing the cycle of life and death. While skulls often represent mortality, they also suggest rebirth in many cultures. Herck draws on the Vanitas tradition to highlight the fleeting nature of life and the futility of material pursuits.

A defining feature of the series is the cut-out patterns in the skulls, which are always religious in nature. Cow horns shaped to resemble stiletto heels add a contemporary twist, introducing themes of vanity, power, and society’s obsession with appearance. This contrast between sacred symbolism and modern consumer culture offers a pointed critique of superficial values.

Overall, the Stiletto Series merges classical and modern elements to reflect on mortality, identity, and the search for meaning in today's world.

The Holy Trinity and the Stiletto Series (2018) reflect Tom Herck’s ongoing exploration of Christian symbolism and material meaning.

In The Holy Trinity, God is represented as three figures—the Father (a hand), the Son (a lamb), and the Holy Spirit (a pigeon)—set on a granite surface shaped like a church façade, chosen for its reflective qualities.

In the Stiletto Series, Herck revisits the Trinity using red copper, a material symbolizing both blood and purification by fire in Christian tradition. The color red, often linked to love, sacrifice, and conflict, evokes the blood of Christ—central to themes of salvation and devotion in Christian history.

Herck arranges three skulls to represent the Trinity: a larger skull at the center for God, and two smaller, more damaged ones for Christ and the Holy Spirit. Their placement echoes the sign of the cross, reinforcing the connection to the crucifixion and the distinct, yet unified nature of the divine.

A new phase in the Stiletto series will be marked by an exploration of the human skull and bone -as a universal theme of war and death-, interacting with the cow skull. The Totenkopf, German skull-and-crossbones, was the perfect sigil for the SS. National Socialism took it as a dark, foreboding symbol of courage and self sacrifice, built upon two centuries of traditional use in the German military, dating to the reign of Friedrich the Great himself.
Destruction plays an immense role in contemporary art as rebellion or protest, as spectacle and release, or as an essential component of re-creation and restoration. Nietzsche's announcement in the 19th century that God is dead was significant in art's 'Big Bang'. In recent years, art often reflects life in the age of terrorism and destructive images shoot across the Internet at such incredible speeds that we see so much of this every day. Extreme examples of artists destroying their own work are John Baldessari’s Cremation project (1970), burning 13 years’ worth of 'boring art' he’d made and of course Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995).

© Text by Lara van Oudenaarde.
© Photos by Tom Herck.