Gert De Clercq (BE, born 1980) graduated last academic year from Peter De Cupere’s Open Senses Lab at PXL-MAD in Hasselt. The artist suggests and misleads, playing with form, material, language, contrasts, front and backstage. His sculptures spontaneously bring a smile to your face. De Clercq’s compositions are constructed using a visual language derived from our surrounding reality. He imitates everyday objects and places them as a kind of punctuation in our reality. Functionality is removed or displaced. The artist uses his own body as a measure for his work. For it is the human who perceives, interprets, and through embodiment gives meaning to reality. Trained in Chicago as a sculptor and specializing in casting bronze and other metals, Emily Hutchings (USA, born 1992) moved to New Mexico in 2018 where she began to weave and dye with natural pigments. Today, the artist creates textile works that are assertive about their monumental presence in space and their right to exist as sculpture. Coming from the male-dominated world of sculpting, Hutchings makes a statement with her textile translation of a typically hard material visual language. Intrinsic qualities of materials are highlighted, small knitting or weaving movements are magnified, and delicate natural materials and colors are given a more permanent character through treatment with corrosive products. Hutchings’ sculptures remind us that beauty lies in the small things, which she calls “antimonuments,” atypical beacons in space that demand attention for their (mate)reality.