Through a delicate re-configuration of the circumstances, Nel Verbeke aims for situations that allow us to both acknowledge and experience the (emotional) ambivalence of our nature. A committed and in-depth inquiry manifested through concepts and designs with an articulated interrelationship between gestures, time and materiality. For it is only in the recognition of our own vulnerability and transience that we can grasp the true meaning of our existence; an awareness that forces us to consciously deal with the passing of a moment, the implications of an act and the ephemerality of the things we surround us with.

In showing The Mirror / Hourglass, Nel Verbeke presents a design situated in the initial findings of her research and related to melancholy as a state of enhanced contemplation. The instrument which, in its shape and appearance, alludes to historical artefacts and apparatus, enables a ritual in which the passage of time is reconsidered and where the black sand – travelling through the elongated glass tube – is detached from the calibrated standards with which we measure our minutes and limit the hours; representing, as such, a time which is autonomous and becomes a space that could be accessed, even inhabited. Furthermore, the concept of a mirror is reconnected to the need for a more profound self-reflection, a moment of (self-)consciousness that does not shun the realisation that we too are subject to a continuous state of transformation. A finite process which is embodied within the traces of decay on the silver surface of the mirror itself; alluding to the possibility that one day the mirror will be entirely eroded and our reflection might once disappear as well.

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