My artistic practice involves casting concrete tiles, plates, and blocks, coating them with silver gelatin, and developing them as analogue photographs. The resulting images do not merely sit on objects; they are objects. They reveal the material conditions and constraints of their making. From mixing and curing the concrete to sanding, coating, exposing, developing, fixing, and dyeing the image, every step leaves its mark and shapes the final outcome. Surfaces are chipped and cracked, exposure times become visible, images appear fragmented. What emerges is a body of work at the boundary between photography and sculpture: images that have mass, throw a shadow, and resonate when tapped. They refuse to be scrolled or flattened, and must be met directly and in person.

From the earliest experiments with photography, the medium has involved a struggle with materiality: how can an image adhere to an unlikely surface like stone or metal? My work reopens this question. Concrete is water, sand, stone, and cement: decidedly un-glossy, yet capable of texture, tonal nuance, and weight. It allows image and support to be fused together. Concrete depicts concrete, stone carries stone.

These images come about over an extended period of time, through material resistance and process-based negotiation. They represent incremental steps in an ever-evolving process. Never final, never fully fixed.

BIO

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (b. 1976) is a visual artist and linguist working in Leuven and Amsterdam. Trained in linguistics, he graduated in 2024 as a photographic artist from the Institute for Arts and Crafts in Mechelen, Belgium. His work explores the photographic image as a physical object. Using concrete, silver gelatin, and analogue darkroom processes, he makes works that sit between photography and sculpture.

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