Sarah Smolders

Sarah Smolders (°1988, lives & works in Brussels) handles the conditions in which space is created, viewed and lived. To them, these conditions are material, political and affective, connected to the gazes and the bodies that move around in this space.

Site-specific gestures and painterly actions invite different ways of looking and moving. They are also the building blocks of a spatial vocabulary that Smolders repeatedly revisits and translates in order to read and touch upon new places. In this way, a practice unfolds in which ‘work’ appears both as labour and as form. Starting from painting, Smolders seeks out the company of material, architecture, and language in order to understand space as shaped by time, movement, and memory.

Sarah Smolders – Time Set in Stone (2022/2023)

• Buda Bxl

A monumental waterwheel polishing a stone not only refers to the history of the mills and stonecutters in Buda but also questions the tension between artistic and mechanical labor, and their relationship to time.

Sarah Smolders – On Language (2022/2024)

• Fobrux

The On Language series begins with a relief print made on a letterpress (2020) as an exercise in exploring the space on the page. Bronze sculptures (2024) translate this linguistic element to the scale and the bones of physical space — as an invitation for the space itself to speak.

Sarah Smolders (2025) – Veldwerk (2025)

• Field

Through an imprint of spatial elements, Veldwerk (field work) sets up a dialogue between Fobrux, the field and its surroundings. The works connect industrial production with the ways land and landscape are appropriated, and point to the soil pollution that reproduces itself again and again through the waters of the swamp.

Thanks to PSR/Jan de Nul group & City of Brussels