What we carry

Tijdsbeeld by Peter Verhelst, translated into artisanal woodwork by Thomas Huyghe

‘What We Carry’ forms a Tijdsbeeld by Peter Verhelst, an author who for decades has developed a sensorial and radical voice in novels, poetry, essays, novellas and theatre texts. His oeuvre explores the vulnerability of the body, the instability of identity, and the way memory, language and loss take root within human beings. This literary depth, recognised with numerous awards and translated internationally, receives here a material and spatial translation.

Peter Verhelst formulates the starting point of this Tijdsbeeld as a portable, modular object, a personal carrier of memories and essential belongings, a poetic instrument, a metaphorical emergency kit in which the intimate and the existential come together. From this perspective, migration is not a theme in itself but an underlying human condition; the constant need to decide what to take along and what to leave behind and the question of how meaning can be preserved when everything around us changes. Within that tension between loss and preservation, rupture and continuity, an object emerges that is both archive and refuge. The work reflects a vision of the human being in which identity is not fixed but constantly rearranged.

Thomas Huyghe translates this Tijdsbeeld into artisanal woodwork, working from a deep respect for tradition and process. Craft here functions as a slow form of thinking. Through precision, the object acquires its physical weight and tactile presence. The wood carries traces of labour and time, making the abstract themes tangible.

In the encounter between Peter Verhelst’s artistic universe and Thomas Huyghe’s craft, a dialogue arises between idea and material, between language and handwork. The result is an object that invites closeness and attentive viewing, much like Verhelst’s texts, which are read slowly, layer by layer, with space for doubt. In this way the work becomes a Tijdsbeeld, both mobile and fundamentally human.