BORIS SNAUWAERT
25.04.25 – 27.09.25Rock.Bird.Fire.
Boris Snauwaert is a photographer and graphic designer based in Ghent.Bird. Rock. Fire. is his latest exploration of the space between image and object, suggestion and material.
• for more info and inquiries contact us
• The book Rock.bird.fire is for sale at Studio Cluster in Mechelen and at Tipi Bookshop in Brussels
The images themselves, poetic and suggestive, remain open to multiple interpretations. They don’t tell a direct story but evoke a mood, a memory or a gesture, allowing space for personal association.
Moving between finished work and raw material, between book and wall, Snauwaert creates a layered environment where fragility and tactility play a central role. Even within the defined visual photographic frame, images remain fluid: folded, overlapped, transparent, plied. Here, even the back of a print becomes an image, a reminder of what lies beneath.
Like the accompanying publication Rock.Bird.Fire., a miniature book of two folded riso-prints, the exhibition plays with sequence and association, shifting back and forth between the suggestion of the image and its materiality. Both the book and the exhibition avoid linear storytelling and instead invite the viewer in a field of potential meanings and explore the changing connections between word, image and material.
Andrea Copetti from Tipi Bookshop on the new book of Boris Snauwaert
Boris Snauwaert’s new book, Rock. Bird. Fire., feels like a poetic continuation—and a deep distillation—of his earlier vision: not just a landscape to explore, but a tactile and intimate terrain of human gesture, nature’s remnants, and ephemeral presence. Where once the eye wandered through mountains as through a continuous panorama, now the gaze must dwell—more like a fingertip than a footstep—on smaller, quieter epiphanies.§
In the earlier work, movement was key: “leaning the pages,” “crossing landscapes,” “going back and forth.” In Rock. Bird. Fire., the motion is internal, the rhythm more breath than stride. Here, each image becomes a kind of talisman, an object of pause and reflection, not passage.
This new form—a miniature book of folded prints—invites a different kind of journey: one where scale shrinks, yet meaning expands. The mountain is still there, but it’s become metaphor, abstraction, or memory. The hands holding butterflies become the new peaks—fragile, alive, subject to vanishing. The wrecked roof and fallen tree echo environmental erosion, but also internal collapse. Bird feet on a wooden pole hint at balance, perching, the moment before flight or fall.
If Rock. Bird. Fire. is a landscape, it’s no longer geographic—it’s emotional and symbolic. Fire is the passion or the ruin; rock, the permanence or the burden; bird, the spirit or the watchfulness.
Snauwaert is shaping a kind of folk-poetic ethnography—not of a region, but of perception itself. His images are not explanatory but invitational. They don’t document; they suggest. They whisper rather than declare.
You could say he’s moved from the map to the memory. From landscape as distance to landscape as skin.
The 96 copies are printed on the occasion of the show "Rock. Bird. Fire." at Studio Cluster. The publication consists of two riso-prints folded into a miniature book.