EDITH DEKYNDT

As a point of departure for this exhibition, Dekyndt focuses on the vision of an insular society preserved from the forces that shape the rest of the world, a theme inspired by Aldous Huxley’s final novel, “Island”, published in 1962, in which conditions for a possible co-existence between living beings, resources, and ways of inhabiting the world are reimagined.

The island emerges here as a territory of condensation. Defined by its boundaries, it offers the possibility of observing the circulation of matter, narratives, and practices on a scale where the complexity of the world becomes perceptible without ever being simplified. These insular microcosms, with their fragile balances and interdependencies, have long informed the artist’s reflection.

On Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, Dekyndt encountered a community seeking to develop a new economic and cultural model grounded in reciprocity between territory, its inhabitants, and artistic creation. On Ibiza, another form of insularity comes into play: a magnetism—both geological and symbolic—that has, for centuries, attracted artists, musicians, alternative communities, and club culture, turning the island into a site of successive projections.

In Dekyndt’s work, the viewer encounters traces of a journey. Fishing ropes from Fogo Island fused with glass are on display in vitrines, alongside 3-D prints on found wood and animal skins, and a new tapestry is presented on the surrounding wall. The objects in olive, pine, or petrified wood are representative of the unconventional material supports that Dekyndt favours, fossilised remnants of erosion and time. These sculptures, with their algorithmically generated 3D extensions, carry refined mutations enveloping bases of wood, pelt, or sheepskin.

The Water Sizzling at the Prow, a large-scale tapestry derived from facsimiles of found boat carpets from Fogo Island, extends the seafaring narrative. A large-scale fabric, Underground, Santa Agnès de Corona, Ibiza Island, 2023–2024, resonates as a living record of material time, having been submerged for months underground. Dekyndt’s research into the ecological impact of invasive species upon native fauna of Ibiza informs Animal Methods, 2024, a video work which examines the interchangeable behaviours of animals and humans. The sloughed-off skin of a snake becomes a flag in the wind, its colour and texture serving as a stark contrast to the peaceful connotation of a white flag. Snakes attack with poison only as a form of defence, unlike humans, who may choose to be violent for a multitude of reasons. The billowing of its molten remains conversely feels meditative and calming, compared to the performative symbols and aggressions of mankind.

Wisdom of the Other Shore, in the form of a 3D print of sand, evokes a mirage, a lost utopia or a desert island world. Why Would A Beach Tree and Gothic Moat in the Faraway Green Valley, are comprised of 3D prints on carob or petrified wood, shown alongside 3D prints in a range of materials, and textile works that have undergone similar stages of decomposition, bringing them into poetic harmony with the temporalities of the earth.

The works brought together in this exhibition connect these two distant geographies, the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The objects that compose them carry the memory of these journeys and of the contexts from which they emerged. Placed in dialogue, they articulate a material language in which distances collapse and correspondences arise without hierarchy. Faithful to her practice, Edith Dekyndt does not seek to represent these territories but rather to make perceptible the subtle forces that traverse them: those that connect materials to histories, gestures to landscapes, and objects to the forms of life they make possible.

Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery.