Hilde De Decker's work is not only an object-based practice but also a spatial one, the body serving not as the exclusive destination for jewellery, but as the reference to operate in a human-scale environment. It comes as no surprise that she studied interior architecture for two years before starting her training as a jewellery maker at Sint Lucas Antwerpen. The metaphor of the home says a lot about her work, which is an investigation of value creation when diving into the dense materiality of everyday life. Indeed, De Decker's work has to be approached as a sensorial architecture made up of several chambers. Like successive still life’s, they reveal an internal logic underlying the artist's recurrent themes: jewellery as a perspective to reflect on value; domesticity and conceptualism; and the beauty of the obsolete.

        -- Monica Gaspar






Hilde De Decker strives to preserve ephemeral moments or to collect their traces, to make an inventory of her own means, to transform exhibition spaces into places of production, or to leave there the marks of a vaguely institutionalized domesticity.
It is therefore not a practice without objects — some of these objects may even be “wearable,” but that is probably their least interesting characteristic. She is regarded by her peers as a “conceptual jeweler”: her work is marked by intellectual coherence much more than by stylistic consistency.

       -- Ben Lignel