A summer at Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC
A chance discovery of a 10-ton rock in Bushwick became the starting point for a summer-long outdoor process of hammering copper onto its surface, transforming it into an Oumuamua-inspired sculptural collision between cosmic impact, urban infrastructure, and the lived reality of public space.
Rock'n Roll (Sisyphus Part II) imagines a meteor not as an ending, but as a vessel of potential—a scar in the universe holding the possibility of new worlds. By chance, upon my arrival in New York, I found a roughly 10-ton rock in Bushwick during my first week, thanks to a friend who spotted it in a parking space. Street workers had dug it up from beneath the sidewalk while working on underground pipeline infrastructure, and the boulder had simply been in their way. That accidental encounter with a massive geological object became a foundational reference point for the work.
Throughout the summer, I have been hammering copper sheets directly onto this rock, slowly building an Oumuamua-inspired sculptural form that eventually “crashes” onto a Costco shopping cart, collapsing cosmic scale into the absurdity of consumer infrastructure and everyday urban objects. The process has become as important as the form itself—an ongoing negotiation between weight, impact, and transformation, where the rock functions as both an anchor and a fictional impact site.
Working at Socrates Sculpture Park changed how I think about scale and exposure. Suddenly the studio had no walls. The work stood in the open, against the East River and the Manhattan skyline, and it had to hold its own against all of it. Outdoor sculpture is unforgiving in that environment: weather gets a vote, and wind, rain, and the slow chemistry of the air continue working on the piece long after you step away. Copper responds especially well to this condition—it patinates, shifts colour, and gradually becomes more itself over time, as if the park itself is completing what the hammer begins.
The presence of an open public space also changes the audience entirely. In a gallery, viewers come specifically to look at art; in a public park, they arrive by accident, to walk a dog, sit, or eat lunch, and the sculpture must earn their attention without explanation or framing. That pressure strips away anything overly coded or insider-driven, leaving only what can hold presence on its own.
Coming out of this experience, I returned to Antwerp with larger ambitions and a deeper respect for objects that must exist outside, in the world, exposed to time, weather, and everyone passing through it.