This gate was made for a solo exhibition at a gallery in Belgium in 2010, and shown later as part of an installation in The Netherlands in 2011, after which it needed to be stored. By lack of suitable sized storage, I mounted it between two spruce trees in a little family forest, by means of public art intervention.
After less than two months, I got word that the gate had vanished. The gate was barely functional, almost three meters high, a-symmetrical and constructed from used pallet wood provided by the Verbeke art foundation. It didn’t close well and was incredibly heavy. As a gate, it was worthless.
The gate disappeared in the mist of time, so to speak, until the little family forest died because of a convergence of climatological and ecological issues causing the European spruce bark beetle outbreak that is still ongoing at the time of this writing. With the resulting clear-cut becoming a central part in my artistic trajectory, I realised that first this portal disappeared, and then the forest.
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