Tables of Power

Ceramic, solid sugar and sugar glaze, wood and video 2026

Inspired by sugar sculptures at royal dinners, Tables of Power turns the dining table into a stage for a fragile world. Fenced enclosures hold miniature wild and domestic animals arranged precisely as if in a game, echoing childhood play but shaped by the logics of war and governance. 

The sculptures remind us of historic craftsmanship and the violence associated with the sugar trade, colonial extraction, and slavery. The table becomes a small-scale world where authority, ownership, and knowledge are constructed. A black and white video in the chapel next door activates the installation as performers slowly reposition the figures, negotiating territory in a way that resembles ritual, their gestures hinting at exchange and strategy. The work exposes how imagination and history come together in the human impulse to order, possess and govern the natural world. 

The work was commissioned and presented as part of the exhibition State of Wander: Towards Environmental Restoration, presented at Museum Het Loo, Apeldoorn, Netherlands, curated by Anna Bitkina.