The Paddocks Gallery is pleased to present You Sowed So Much I Can Bloom, a solo exhibition by Bregje Sliepenbeek. Featuring a new series of sculptures and metal works created following the artist’s residency at The Paddocks in summer 2026, the exhibition reflects on grief and growth, and on the bond between mother and daughter.
When Demeter, the Olympian goddess of the harvest, loses her daughter Persephone to the underworld, she is overcome by sorrow, causing the land to dry of crops and grains. With her return to the surface of the earth, Demeter restores fertility to the soil and seeds begin to grow. Yet this return is never complete, as Persephone remains forced to an eternal cycle of moving between human world and the underworld.
Echoing the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Sliepenbeek considers the relationship between a mother and daughter separated, yet eternally bound. In the exhibition, however, it is encountered from the opposite perspective. Dedicated to the memory of the artist’s mother, Ine, You Sowed So Much I Can Bloom honours her unexpected passing last summer in Mount Pelion.
In antiquity, this myth offers an explanation for the cycle of the seasons with Persephone embodying vegetation: seeds disappearing into the earth when sown, remaining hidden for a time, eventually emerging from the soil. Like the seasonal movement held within, the exhibition reflects on the legacies that shape us. The love, protection, and trust, and the cycle that carries one into the other; seeds placed into the earth, hands that tend to them, flowers that may eventually sprout.
Seeds, hands, and flowers, cast and hammered in metal, are mounted, suspended, and set into movement. Working primarily with aluminium, the artist challenges the apparent rigidity of her materials, shaping them into delicate and, at times, weightless forms. The physically demanding act of transforming metal is accompanied by a slower, concentrated process of interlocking individual metal chain links, creating works that seem translucent and almost painterly. Juni, juli, augustus, …; the works take their titles after the calendar months in Dutch, tracing the changing seasons as well as well as commemorating the first year since the passing of the artist’s mother.
You Sowed So Much I Can Bloom takes shape around a myth of loss and transformation, and the eternal rhythm of life. Through this dedication, Sliepenbeek highlights the invisible inheritances of love, protection and trust as fertile grounds. Placing a seed and trusting that, in time, it will take root; it will bloom.