By Sara Bright
The first thing you notice about The Fertility of Ruin is how loud it is. The sculpture is small, 18 by 22 by 15 centimetres, and it is a head: a self-portrait bust, tilted back as if mid-thought, with two empty openings where the eyes should be. But the surface has been taken over. Red-orange mushrooms with deep, gilled throats crowd the left cheek. Ochre bracket fungi climb the right side in overlapping shelves. Clusters of turquoise beads gather at the base, and lumps of clear, iridescent glass pool around the neck like water that has not yet drained away.
It is the work of Theresia Helen Alamsyah, a sculptor and light designer based in London, who trades as TERE Atelier. It is also, by her own account, her first sculpture in eight years.
A face under pressure
The bust was formed from a mould of the artist’s own face, and that matters. Cast from life, the face is the most literal thing in the piece, and the work then sets about undoing it. Cracks run through the blue-lilac skin, mottled with yellow and orange, and the label that accompanied the work at a recent group show says the fractures were encouraged but not controlled. The clay, in other words, was allowed to have a say.
This is the strongest idea in the piece. Plenty of artists use decay as a theme; fewer hand part of the decision to the material. The cracks read as events rather than decoration, and the fungi, which feed on what has already broken down, look less like ornament than like consequence. The title does the rest of the arguing. Ruin here is not an ending but a condition of growth, and the face survives by becoming a habitat.
Her wall text puts it as nothing happening despite the ruin, everything because of it. A tidy formulation, perhaps too tidy: it is the sculpture, not the sentence, that persuades.
Eight years away
The gap is part of the story, and the artist is open about it. The label describes the years between her first and second sculptures as a period of movement across Australia, Indonesia and the United Kingdom. Her practice now runs between Jakarta and London.
Read against that, the self-portrait is less a confession than a repair. What the sculpture proposes is that damage and time are not subtracted from a self but added to it. The cracks are the record of the interval.
Light as material
The lighting work is a different register, and it is worth taking seriously on its own terms. Rangkai Temu, from 2023 in Jakarta, is a hanging installation of what appear to be glass feathers in amber, clear and opaque white, suspended on fine transparent wires so that the whole mass sweeps diagonally across a high ceiling, like a flock caught in a turn. The photograph shows an interior that is still being finished, with plastic sheeting taped to the walls, and the piece looks oddly more alive for it.
Orchidée Ailée, from 2025, is more formal. White orchids, some in matt white and some in what looks like gold lustre, hang in loose strata beneath a slatted timber ceiling, and among them move small white birds, hummingbird-like, each trailing a thin gilt stem. The light inside the petals does the work that paint does elsewhere.
Both pieces treat light as something you build with rather than something you point. Both are about suspension, and about many small units reading as one gesture. Neither, on the evidence of the photographs, shares the sculpture’s appetite for mess.
Reservations
Two, in fairness. First, the colour. The Fertility of Ruin is so saturated, so thoroughly jewelled, that it risks prettifying the very thing it is about. A little more restraint, a patch of bare clay or an area that is simply dead, would make the flourishing hit harder. Second, the lighting installations sit in polished domestic and hospitality settings, and the argument about damage that makes the sculpture interesting is not obviously present there. The two bodies of work share a maker and a sense of abundance; whether they share an idea is not yet clear.
The limits of this view are plain: it rests on photographs, not on standing in front of the objects, and on a single new sculpture, which is not enough to judge a return.
What comes next
A Madrid exhibition is planned for June 2027. The venue has not yet been confirmed. It will be the first real test of whether The Fertility of Ruin is the start of a body of work or a single, striking object, and whether the lighting and the sculpture can be made to argue the same case in one room. On the strength of this head alone, it is worth watching.
