Ivory Labyrinth

Ivory Labyrinth begins with a single cut. A head of cabbage, halved through its center, opens like a book, and inside, leaf folds into leaf until the pattern no longer reads as vegetable at all, but as fingerprint, as shell, as a map of somewhere unnamed.

There is a quiet paradox held in that form. The outer leaves are rough, weathered, standing guard, while the heart draws inward through narrowing spirals, as if privacy itself had taken shape. Every labyrinth asks to be walked before it can be understood, and this one asks only to be looked at closely, more than once.

Nothing here is added. The ridges and whorls that seem carved from within are built the way every work in this series is built, through depth and its absence rather than through addition. No paint. No print. No ink.

From a distance the piece settles into stillness, a pale form closed against the dark, monumental and silent. Come closer and it opens, the same surface becoming a field of shifting depth, catching and releasing light with every step, every hour, every angle of the room.

The cabbage, humble and overlooked, becomes here an architecture of concentric passages, echoing the same spiral logic found in shells, in fingerprints, in the rings that mark a tree's years. A small thing made monumental, quietly asking what else we pass by without seeing.

Ivory Labyrinth continues the Art with Void series by Tijs Dragtsma, in which imagery is constructed through depth and absence rather than paint or print. A visual language where absence is not emptiness, but presence. This work is unique.

"Some labyrinths lead outward. This one leads only in."

More about the artist, process and materials can be found on the About page.

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