A playground for species

The sculptural work of the artist Nel Bonte (°1986, Roeselare) has a pure, minimal vocabulary. She creates installations and sculptures consisting of abstracted visual elements, connected by fragments of our reality. The starting point for each new work comes from her daily experience of life. That may mean a banal, insignificant, unnoticed object that she finds in the city, on the way to somewhere or in her studio, such as a lemon squeezer or a bolt from a machine. It might also be an architectural construction that she has come across on a walk, such as a hut in the woods, a shelter or a sauna. Perhaps it is a dispenser that catches her eye, for example: a cylinder, tube or container that dispenses a certain quantity of a liquid or material for use or consumption, such as paper, soap or water. For Nel Bonte, the shape of such items is a creative stimulus that inspires her work. She appears to have made the concept of a ?dispenser? something entirely of her own, exploring it until it is completely transformed into a unique sculptural form: GORST. She transforms every ?objet trouvé? in this way: the object becomes a work of art, the apparently meaningless gains meaning, a detail or fragment becomes its own context or reality. She has various ways of going about this. For instance, she plays with realistic scale by shrinking or expanding it. The choice of material is also crucial, with the material acting as a skin that helps to determine the content of the sculpture. Last but not least, she searches constantly for a dialogue or confrontation between the sculpture and the viewer in a specific space. (Text by Els Wuyts).