After the Tide

For centuries, the still life transformed perishable objects into meditations on beauty, value and mortality. In After the Tide, Thirza Schaap turns this tradition towards discarded plastic collected from coastlines: a material shaped by brief use, yet defined by its refusal to disappear. The exhibition asks what happens when one of art history’s most enduring genres is used to represent one of contemporary life’s most persistent materials.

Gathering fragments washed ashore, Schaap constructs sculptural arrangements that evoke flowers, vessels, specimens and unfamiliar organisms. Through careful composition, colour and light, these remnants are made strange and newly visible. Recognition unfolds gradually. What first appears delicate or precious reveals itself as the residue of contemporary consumption.

Alongside the photographic works, After the Tide includes a selection of the sculptural forms from which the photographs emerge. Presented together, the objects and images reveal photography not simply as documentation, but as the final material through which the work is transformed.

Rather than relying on the visual language of environmental catastrophe, Schaap works through seduction and sustained attention. Beauty slows perception. In that pause, discarded matter acquires another presence, and the still life becomes a way of asking what contemporary culture preserves, what it abandons, and what kinds of value it continues to produce.