Clara Spilliaert / Soil Mate

Gaasbeek Castle welcomes artist Clara Spilliaert (b. 1993, Tokio) for her first solo museum exhibition. She interweaves a selection of her existing works and a newly created work with this unique setting and its rich history.

Spilliaert's work as an artist links personal experiences with reflections on history and elements of nature. Relocating from Japan to Belgium led to the creation of thousands of intimate drawings in her journal that formed the seed of her visual language. Nowadays, she works with a wide range of media – from drawings and murals to ceramic sculptures and site-specific installations. Inside the castle, you will discover this diversity in works created over the past decade. They unfold as subtle interventions, entering into dialogue with the castle rooms and their stories.

Clara Spilliaert creates images that achieve a fine balance between the everyday and the allegorical and are rooted in attentive observation. In Calendar (2017) – itself a nod to ancient books of hours – her urban garden and the way it moves and changes with the seasons reflect an inner world. The work can be seen in the Gallery, where it is reflected against the castle's Inner Garden that is visible through the window. Spilliaert delves more deeply into the relationship of humans with their bodies and their surroundings. She explores how fixed forms and symbols can dissolve into new, fluid narratives in which people, animals and plants merge, as in the amorphous Coat of Arms in the Archive Room.

For this exhibition, Clara Spilliaert created Soil Mate: a short, stop-motion film, in which a picnic blanket acts as a stage. Based on her personal experience picnicking in the castle's parterre garden, she turns her gaze to what is going on beneath the surface. We then descend into a world that operates to a rhythm of its own, largely independent on any human presence. The film traces the story of an imaginary patch of land, month by month, in twelve recurring scenes. Within this cyclical journey, processes taking place above and below ground become intertwined. Passing through tunnels and along food chains, you are eventually led back to your own body.

Spilliaert explores the tension that exists between private and public, control and rebellion, surface and depth.