Helga Renders

A family portrait, carved from time.

This bas-relief brings together my grandparents and their seven children, my father’s family, based on an old family photograph that preserved a moment from their lives.

By translating that photograph into relief, I wanted to preserve more than their faces. The work carries something of the world in which they grew up: close to the land, surrounded by space, with a natural connection to the world around them.

The rough surface surrounding the figures almost evokes earth, stone or bark. In the green-patinated version, that connection becomes even stronger. The family seems not simply to stand against it, but almost to emerge from it.

It is a work about family and memory, but also about a way of life that is gradually becoming more distant from us.

A moment from the past made tangible, so it does not entirely disappear.

Version:
Plaster.