WHAT'S ON IN THE VALLEY

CALYCES

9 Aug

NIROX Sculpture Park

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A collaboration between Kendall Buster & Siemon Allen

in dialogue with DearRibane

​Titled Calyces Models (2026), the inventory of Kendall Buster’s paper- and foam-board sculptures on display in Natura Co-Lab offers a window into the speculative spaces of the artist’s idea generation process. They operate like sketches for an imaginary architecture as well as scale models for larger works, such as the 9-metre long, semitransparent structure that Buster and her partner, Siemon Allen, made for DearLand (located in the north-eastern corner of the park). Constructed from two-dimensional planar material that has been transformed into three-dimensional forms, the works also resonate with strategies for garment making, where rolls of fabric are cut from flat patterns and assembled to ultimately offer shape to a body when worn.

“There is an eroticism implicit in all architectural spaces,” note Buster and Allen of the larger work. “Once penetrated, they embrace, contain, shelter, or frame a human body.” Inspired by biological forms, this structure was “designed and built with accessible chambers, operating as both a presence on the landscape and a site of enclosure; a territory where animal or plant and machine might meet. Combined are
suggestions of a dirigible, chrysalis, cage, belly, flowering bulb, or shelter. The transparent agricultural shade-cloth skin links exterior with interior space. Low entryways and swelling interior chambers act in direct confrontation with the body through a dual compression and opening up of space to direct movement. At once seductive and threatening, the sculpture foregrounds the contradictory promise of
protection and the threat of a trap, offering an uneasy (uncertain) embrace.”

In response, DearRibane presents a series of sculptural garments conceived not as fashion, but as extensions of the sculpture itself. Constructed through volume, structure, and membrane, the garments echo the architectural language of Buster’s forms, translating spatial ideas onto the body.