De Rebus Naturae series

2025

Bust 50 × 90 × 50 cm – Thistle flowers 43 × 70 × 10 cm – Base 50 × 90 × 50 cm.

Textile installation – bust sewn in felt – Mixed media – Dried thistle flowers.

With Arsa Mater, the body of the Earth becomes flesh and charcoal, silently bearing witness to the ferocity of climate change. The sculpture — a headless, armless bust — takes on the appearance of an archetypal figure, mother and victim at once, deprived of voice and action, marked by a burning metamorphosis.

The black, translucent canvas-skin evokes the surfaces of cooled lava or charcoal: living matter that has known combustion. It is the body after the fire, but not yet after rebirth. From the belly, split open like a pod cracked by heat, emerge tangled meshes of partially melted plastic netting, synthetic remnants that nature cannot digest. That wounded womb thus becomes not a cradle, but a crossroads of toxic residues, a symbol of denied and contaminated fertility.

At the foot of the base, black thistles, their flowers burned, punctuate the ground like funeral wreaths. They were once thorns and a means of defence; now they are charred. Their presence evokes a lost, raw beauty that does not cease to speak, even in destruction.

Arsa Mater speaks not only of fires, but of fire as a symptom of climate change. It is a silent cry against indifference, a body bearing upon itself the visible signs of ecological collapse. Within it are intertwined the fragility of textile matter and the brutality of the burned, the artist’s gesture and the urgency of the present.