In this sculptural installation, Jonas Vansteenkiste explores the tension between visibility and absence, between body and architecture, between historical weight and projected meaning. The installation consists of several sculptural elements that reference classical columns—a motif deeply rooted in Western architectural and cultural history. Some of the columns appear whole, others are broken or incomplete, resembling ruins of an imaginary temple. Their differing heights and finishes prevent them from functioning as structural supports; instead, they operate as carriers of layered meaning.

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A striking component of the installation is the group of transparent cylindrical forms, constructed from corrugated plexiglass sheets—commonplace, industrial materials typically found in hardware stores. Vansteenkiste elevates these utilitarian objects into poetic sculptural containers in which light, reflection, and distortion play a key role. Within one of these transparent columns, placed on a pedestal, is a sculpture. Yet due to the rippling distortion of the plexiglass, the viewer can never see the piece in its entirety.

One must move, shift perspective, and search—only to find that full visibility remains out of reach.

The elusive object within this sculptural cocoon is a 3D print: a digital morph between a Corinthian column and the neoclassical sculpture Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (ca. 1889) by Louis-Ernest Barrias. In Barrias’ work, Nature is allegorized as a sensual, passive woman who lifts her veil before the masculine gaze of science—a vivid symbol of 19th-century ideas of rationality, control, and gender. Vansteenkiste’s morph, however, resists this tradition. His hybrid form fuses architectural ornament with the human figure in a way that defies hierarchy or dominance. Rather than revealing, the form obscures and transforms.

 

The choice of the Corinthian order is deliberate. In Roman architecture, it was seen as the most ornate and ‘feminine’ of the classical orders, its origin described in Vitruvius’ De Architectura.  "A freeborn Maiden of Corinth, Just of Marriageable age, was attacked by an illness and passed away. After her Burial, her nurs, collecting a few little things which used to give the girl pleasure while she was alive, put them in a basket, carried it to the tomb, and laid it on top, covering it with a roof-tile so that the things might last longer in the open air. This basket happened to be placed above the root of an acanthus. The acanthus root, ... when springtime came round put forth leaves and stalks in the middle, and the stalks, growing up along with sides of the basket, and pressed out by the corners of the tile through the compulsion of its weight, were forced to bend into volutes at the outer edges. Just then Callimachus (Greek sculptor) whom the Athenians colled (Catatechnos) for the refinement and delicacy of his artistic work, passed by the tomb and observed the basket with the tender young leaves growing around it. Delighted with the novel style and form, he built up some columns after that pattern for the Corinthians, determined their symmetrical proportions, and established from that time forth the rules to be followed in finished works of the Corinthian order."(Vitruvius 1960, 104-106(Book 4, Chapter 1, 9-10) 

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This story speaks of memory, organic chance, and the merging of nature with human craft.

Vansteenkiste reactivates this narrative in a contemporary context—one that also includes material culture and consumer aesthetics. His column is no longer merely ornamental; it becomes a bearer of cultural codes, gender politics, and layered memory. The use of translucent, prefabricated materials like DIY corrugated plexiglass blurs the boundary between the sacred and the mundane, between museum-worthy monumentality and everyday functionality.

The installation demands a performative relationship from the viewer: you must engage with the incompleteness of the columns, with the fragmented body inside, with your own gaze being refracted and bent. In this way, space itself becomes a second skin—folding around our senses, perceptions, and projections.

In Between Columns and Veils, Vansteenkiste constructs a sculptural field where architectural history, materiality, and identity politics converge in a fragile choreography of concealment and revelation. What was once a proud symbol of order and permanence is here transformed into a soft, elusive echo—a column that refuses to be fully revealed.

 

 
Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science (La Nature se dévoilant à la Science) is an allegorical sculpture created in 1899 in the Art Nouveau style by Louis-Ernest Barrias. 
 
A special thx to Sander Alblast and EKWC and Fablab Brabant for technical support.