Objects in glass and resin beadwork, polished aluminium, and European oak
Constellation
2026
De Cock inhabits the threshold between craft and art, between the decorative and the autonomous, between the body that wears and the space that holds. Her practice was born precisely in that liminal zone: taking embroidery and beadwork — techniques historically in service of the garment — and liberating them from their supporting role, allowing them to stand alone, to speak for themselves, to become something else entirely. This act of emancipation is itself a border crossing. The ornament, once defined by what it adorned, is redefined by its own presence. The line — drawn intuitively, almost automatically, without the intervention of rational thought — becomes a protagonist. It wanders. It dances. It refuses to be contained.
In her most recent body of work, those lines move with increasing freedom. They stretch across walls, suspend themselves between floor and ceiling, and enter into dialogue with constellations of glass beads — some hand-embroidered in the traditional manner by craftsmen in India, others blown by a glassmaker and enlarged to the point where the bead itself becomes a sculptural object, questioning its own nature and function. The border between material and form, between technique and meaning, is continuously negotiated.
The new Constellation series, presented here, pushes this logic further. Lines now move freely in three-dimensional space, no longer bound to the wall. Beads — transparent, enlarged, structurally present — form legs that support tables and racks, revealing the construction beneath. Light passes through them, doubling shadows, shifting colour, connecting the work to the present moment and the specific space it inhabits. The border between sculpture, furniture, jewellery and architecture becomes productive rather than restrictive: a place of invention.
The eye moves between the whole and the detail, between the sweep of a line and the individual bead that catches and refracts the light. Between what was made by hand in a moment of pure intuition and what required months of meticulous, dedicated craft. Between the intimate and the architectural. Between a tradition passed down through generations and a sensibility that is entirely, unmistakably contemporary. It is, as the theme of this festival suggests, precisely in these border spaces that something new becomes possible.
Marijke De Cock lives and works in Antwerp, where she previously studied Fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. She has been working for years as a designer within the team of Dries Van Noten, where she specialises, among other things, in the conception and creation of exceptional ornaments and jewellery. An engagement that in a sense inspired her personal practice, by adopting an established craft that is usually related to the garment it is meant to serve, yet which she allows to function autonomously and in full. It is an ancient and traditional, time-consuming technique – involving working with glass beads and passed from generation to generation – which she sensibly juxtaposes with her fascination for the hand that, as it were, moves by itself, seems to make its own decisions, and transcends thought. It all together manifests itself in distinctive series of abstracted, intuitive wall sculptures which, adorned with beads, above all celebrate the desire to create, using a material that goes back thousands of years, motivating us from childhood onwards to invent ornaments with it, to embellish a person or a place.