Aad Kruiswijk

Aad Kruiswijk trained at the Hout en Meubileringscollege and continued at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, a route that grounded his work equally in making and in thinking about form. The machine, for him, is not a neutral tool but a collaborator: he uses industrial processes to arrive at shapes that resist being made by hand.

MineralisM, the series shown here, takes its form from constraint rather than from design. Kruiswijk fitted a robotic arm with a chainsaw and cut solid Amsterdam city timber with it — a tool that can only make straight cuts, and therefore only sharp, asymmetrical planes. What comes out are crystalline volumes that resemble minerals without imitating them. The form is a direct trace of the process that made it.

From one of those original shapes a second line of enquiry opened: the same contour re-examined in stainless steel, corten steel and MDF. Mirrored and fluid, dark and grounded, light and matte — one outline, three entirely different presences.

Kruiswijk works at the intersection of art, technology and nature, a combination the system rarely knows where to file. With MineralisM he found a form that exists nowhere else: identical in contour, radically different in experience.

Within GROUND he stands for the conviction that precision and individuality are not opposites. His route is technical and entirely personal at the same time.