“My sculptures are gravity-defying, organic forms that combine industrial and transparent materials to imagine monuments
from a future heritage.”
GRAVITY FORMS
— Sculptures of Emergent Heritage
Harmke Datema-Chang creates large-scale, organic sculptures that negotiate gravity, light, and mass. Combining steel, concrete, epoxy, and transparent elements, her works carry the weight of things that have not yet been named — artifacts from an imagined future, insisting on a form of heritage rooted in emergence rather than inheritance. They do not commemorate what was. They preserve what is still becoming.
Conceptual Core: What gets to be called heritage, and who decides? These sculptures propose an answer in material form — monumental, grounded, and unresolved.
Medium: Large-scale sculpture; steel, concrete, epoxy, spray paint, transparent elements
Scale: Architectural / outdoor / site-responsive
Status: Ongoing
RITUAL PAINTINGS
— Creation as Counter-Force
Definition:
These works are created through intuitive, ritual-based processes in which painting becomes an act of protection, resistance, and transformation. The body is central: gestures are instinctive, layered, and often repetitive, allowing the surface to absorb tension rather than resolve it. Where BUY OR BURN confronts what is allowed to disappear, these paintings insist on what must be made and held — creation as a deliberate counter-force to destruction, whether personal, social, or systemic.
Conceptual Core:
To paint is to take a position. These works are not illustrations of ideas — they are the risk of making something, taken again and again.Creation as an intentional response to destructive forces — personal, social, or systemic.
Medium: Painting, mixed media on canvas / panel
Status: Ongoing studio practice
Function: Intimate, autonomous works
BUY OR BURN
— Performative Systems & Public Risk
Definition:
BUY OR BURN is a long-term performative artwork that stages a public auction in which unsold works are destroyed, forcing audiences to confront questions of value, authorship, preservation, and complicity. The audience does not simply witness — they decide. Their choice, or their silence, determines what survives. Nothing is symbolic.
The destruction is real.
Conceptual Core: Who decides what survives? What does ownership mean when destruction is the alternative? And what does it say about us — as individuals, as institutions, as a culture — when we let something disappear?
Medium: Performative auction, installation, video, text
Status: 2019–ongoing
Function: Public, discursive, institutional-scale work
“BUY OR BURN is my long-term artistic work. I began it five years ago as a response to how value, authorship, and survival operate in the art world. Every edition is a continuation of that same artwork.”