Jonas Vansteenkiste |3 Combined residency Arnaud Rogard

Houses are a recurrent theme in the respective oeuvres of Arnaud Rogard and Jonas Vansteenkiste. In a collaboration initiated by crip art organisation wit.h, the artists created a set of inspirational houses that function as an ideographic script. Childhood memories and cultural references provide rich soil horizons for the twelve houses – six each – they made at EKWC. Their mothers’ homes for instance, Rachel Whiteread’s “House”, or Alice bursting out of the White Rabbit’s residence in Wonderland. To accentuate their syntactic nature, the houses will be 3D-modelled into moulds that can be combined to form new structures. Moulds are also part of the fungi that contribute to soil fertility, an allusion to wit.h’s theme of sottobosco, the rich life in a forest’s undergrowth. Watching Rogard, who has Down syndrome, flourish among his fellow artists at EKWC, you realise that the ‘tall trees’ in the forest should make some room more often.

Rogard and Vansteenkiste worked primarily with hand and slab-building techniques for their series of houses. They experimented with glazes — breaking out of more customary palettes (in the case of Rogard) and working to enhance shapes and textures. Rogard worked exclusively with white clay bodies and, Vansteenkiste, with red. For his work outside the collaborative house series, Vansteenkiste produced a series of cast, wall-hanging building facades in an array of sizes. The moulds for these were digitally drawn and then milled from solid plaster blocks. He chose and worked with a variety of glazes and applied them somewhat randomly to produce some unexpected results; happy accidents.