Elise Eeraerts is a multidisciplinary artist working with site-specific installations concentrating on spatial interventions and time-based media works. Often her work is meant to be a conduit for interrelating human construction and nature. She explores material transformations that originate from the landscape, such as soil becoming a wall, or mud becoming a brick.
Earth, this most primordial of substances, lies at the crux of Elise Eeraerts’s work: from her incursions into land, to her extractions from it, to her appropriation and transformation of sediment into sculptural installations. Earlier works charted raw materials as they became finished products, and the subsequent alienation and commodification that attended these processes. More recently, she has sought to probe more deeply into humankind’s physical and spiritual estrangement from nature. Eeraerts’s view of the environment as a force unto itself is accompanied by a move toward more cyclical and less linear ways of understanding earth. We humans destroy the environment, but nature itself can be both self-destructive and powerfully self-regenerating.