Lost Tablets

The 'Lost Tablets' are a series of works by Jan van Schaik that explore the geometric language of architecture through the medium of children’s toy building blocks. Constructed by Van Schaik from found blocks, with a mute face on one side and a dynamic, distinctly architectural side on the other, each tablet flickers with strange resonances that point to a shared but deeply subjective symbolism of building. From the buttresses of Gothic cathedrals and the blue ceilings of the Shah Mosque of Isfahan, to the inhabited machines and weightless engineering of the Space Age, the genetic lineage of the 'Lost Tablets' is impossible to unpick, even while the potential connections are hard to ignore.