Welded painted steel, 8.5 x 19 x 10, 2019.
In 1576 Spanish troops, unpaid for months, sacked the commercial capital of the Low Countries, killing thousands and burning the Town Hall. When Antwerp surrendered to Spain in 1585, its potters carried tin-glazed earthenware north, and Delftware descends from that tradition. The sculpture is painted in that blue and white, so its colour is the afterlife of the event the title names, and its forms belong to the event itself: the machinery of a siege. Dutch tiles picture ships and soldiers in this colour, and here the pictures have become the objects.
Hollowness joins the two registers. A vessel and a cannon are both tubes, and a pot and a fortification are both shells around an emptiness; the open square tubes here could be either. A sack is what happens when the shell is breached. The parts balance against one another without settling, spread across a landscape format, so every defence in it is already giving way. Blue and white is also the colour of things that break, and the paint is worn at the edges to the pale beneath, like chipped glaze.
