Teresa Hunyadi & Pepijn van den Nieuwendijk – in gesprek
Wat als de wereld om ons heen niet alleen bestaat, maar ook luistert?
Wat als gras droomt, dieren herinneren, en landschappen terugspreken?
Voor de zomerexpositie van GB5 presenteren Teresa Hunyadi en Pepijn van den Nieuwendijk hun gezamenlijke sculpturenreeks Listening Ears: een serie keramische vormen die het luisteren zelf tastbaar maken. Verspreid door de tuin ontstaan paren van oorachtige objecten. Soms dierlijk, soms bijna abstract. Die samen een nieuw soort lichaam vormen: een lichaam dat niet namens de wereld hoort, maar met haar.
In aanloop naar de tentoonstelling sprak curator en schrijver Joshua Miller met de kunstenaars over hun samenwerking, hun werkwijze en de verbeelding die aan de basis ligt van dit project.
Zie hieronder het interview:
What Language Does Grass Dream In? Conversations with Teresa Hunyadi and Pepijn van den Nieuwendijk
Joshua Miller
Delft, March 2026
Five years ago, I cut a photograph out of a Guardian weekend supplement and stuck it in my scrapbook. It showed a mural of four sleeping black rabbits. I always wanted to integrate it into something, perhaps a collage, or a poem to surround them with tender words. There was something compelling about their shared sleep. The mural carried a pleasantly heavy sense of peace, as if the rabbits slept on my chest. It made me feel as if the earth was holding its breath.
Sleeping animals activate a tender curiosity. I wondered what the rabbits were dreaming about, how the life of a rabbit might be remixed in its subconscious and show itself in sleep. Whether the four in the mural dreamt was never in doubt.
Perhaps it is this kind of curiosity, soft, speculative, unanswerable, from which Listening Ears grew. This collaborative sculpture series by Teresa Hunyadi and Pepijn van den Nieuwendijk playfully asks: does the world dreams? If so, what does it dream of? What do rabbits dream of? What about the grass they run through when they wake? Does grass dream? A playful line of imaginative inquiry emerges from the idea of listening carefully to the world around us.
Teresa and Pepijn conducted their inquiry by creating forms that materialise the act of listening — great clay ears inscribed with patterns and living forms to tell stories that don’t begin with us. Something beautiful surfaces: a playful cosmology, the world around us imagined as an active, enthusiastic thing, full of life and always engaged in transformation and flux.
Together with the garden of GB5, in which they are placed, the ears form a shared listening body that does not claim to hear on behalf of the world but instead patiently listens with it. Teresa and Pepijn left room for uncertainty, even smallness; for our place in a natural chorus.
I sat down with Teresa and Pepijn to discuss Listening Ears.
JM Pepijn, Teresa, how are you doing?
PN Great. It’s a really enjoyable collaboration we are doing. We’ve been working since December 2025 and I am very much inspired. Working together is a different way of working. I love it but I get a little out of my comfort zone.
JM What is your comfort zone?
PN I am used to working quite freely – I might make a dragon or a dodo and resolve things later with paint. But here, Teresa’s focus on form has really influenced me. It made me pay closer attention to the sculptural qualities themselves rather than relying on surface painting.
TH Whereas in my practice I don’t paint much, so the form has to stand on its own. The glazing stage is still ahead of us and will shift things in somewhat unpredictable ways. It’s exciting but also a bit daunting, so it’s really good to be around Pepijn’s ease and experience.
JM Have you decided on glazes yet?
PN We will mainly use different glazes than I usually use. Teresa and I share an interest in celadons and wood ash glazes.
TH In the tests we made you see that deeper lines come out lighter and sometimes darker, depending on how transparent or opaque the glaze turns out.
JM Teresa – how are you doing?
TH Also very good. Bouncing ideas off each other has been really enjoyable. We get so caught up that we hardly take breaks — sometimes working until five in the morning – oh, let’s do these sketches, oh, remember that! Our interests really meet, and that’s when it feels a bit magical, and maybe a little endless.
PN We’re on a tight timeline — about three months: shaping, testing, finishing before the April exhibition set-up.
TH On top of that, every pair of objects has led to a different method in building them up – while working we’re inventing as we go.
JM Can you tell me more about the items I see lying here on the table?
PN These are objects and books with images that inspire us – a collection of growing unexpected references we find.
TH For example these ones here: you have lunch, you eat an avocado, the peel stays around, dries and then you’re like, oh, look at this! JM So this avocado peel directly influenced one of the pieces? TH Yes, there is one pair we actually call Avocado when we talk about it! (smile)
JM I can really see the resemblance!
PN When working together and you see something, you get inspired. Ideas emerge very naturally in this collaboration.
JM I had a couple of questions that lean on the listening aspect – part of your title of these pieces – Can you tell me more about it?
TH We are building pairs of ears, animal-inspired ears. Each suggests a different narrative related to listening — how we perceive the world and how the world might perceive itself.
PN Each pair is very different with the kind of story it tells.
JM It seems to me that, conceptually speaking, the two of you are in the business of creating contact zones? Deliberate ones, spaces of interaction of sorts.
TH That’s a nice way to put it. It’s a bit poetic maybe — a contact zone; when things come into contact without intention or meaning. Like, imagining walking on grass, there’s an exchange happening before you even notice it. The grass responds, the body responds. It raises the question: what’s being experienced on both ends? From my perspective, I try to pay attention a bit more consciously — attention, in a way, allows for more space.
PN There is always a response. And listening is something we often lack. For animals it’s a big part of survival.
TH We don’t have much access to other perspectives, so imagination becomes important. At the same time, the work isn’t overly serious. There’s a playful, surreal quality — flying hippos, for instance.
PN It’s about making space for that imagination. Often people have headphones on all the time. One never listens to just the silence of the landscape. And maybe that’s where the flying hippo comes in – you hear something magical, or something you usually don’t hear because we don’t listen carefully.
TH Maybe this work is also about acknowledging that there are multiple realities the whole time. Watching animals moving their ears, imagining my ears becoming their ears, is an inspiring game to play.
PN We also included the image of whales in one of the pairs — thinking about how they communicate through sound. I was reading Moby Dick at the time. The idea of resonance and shared language is quite beautiful, almost magical.
TH On these ears, one whale is swimming up and one down. Just considering that somewhere, right now, whales are ‘coasting between continents’ — it shifts your perspective. I came across a poem by Billy Collins called ‘Whale Day’ at that time.
JM So the two of you are pulling influences from encounters in everyday life and doing this – kind of playful conjecture into the idea of multi-species dream-world like contact zone. What will happen when you put them outside — into the sculpture garden?
TH The placement is a big part of the work.
PN If you see two animal ears on the ground, you wonder where the body is. So the ground turns into the body a bit, and then you start asking what kind of body? What kind of creature? It’s not always clear what kind of animal we made. The rabbits are maybe the most direct.
TH In both of our works you find creatures. They keep coming back.
PN I like humour. (laughs)
PN It’s interesting, because Teresa comes up with ideas I would probably never do myself. Like the stripes on the back — I would never really make the decision to do them this way.
TH For me, stripes are fun. Our approaches do differ, which makes it interesting. But we can engage with each other’s visual language
happily — even when it’s not something we’d do individually.
PN And there’s a balance — we’re not overly protective, which is essential for collaboration. We trust each other.
TH For me, it’s quite unusual working like this. I don’t often let others intervene in my work. But here, because the project sits slightly outside our individual practices, there’s more freedom to experiment.
PN I think it’s very important to be very open to somebody else’s ideas and suggestions. Otherwise collaborations can be difficult.
JM It feels like a very intuitive pairing between you. Kind of a dream collab?
PN It feels good. We’ve been doing some really interesting things. For me it’s a busy time but very fruitful.
TH And practically, working together helps a lot — handling materials, building larger pieces. With four hands instead of two, or even six because we have a wonderful intern as well!
PN Yeah! Pavlos is very helpful. Things get a little bit bigger.
JM Where do you think this project might go? Are there any more stories waiting?
TH Oh we have a whole list — we could really continue this project!
PN We want to keep things open. The meanings and stories aren’t final. Like listening itself, the work leaves space for interpretation and continuity.
Listening Ears can be experienced at GB5, Rhoon from May 10 to September 6, 2026. https://www.gb5.nl/?p=3872
https://teresahunyadi.com/
https://pepijnvandennieuwendijk.com/
Joshua Miller is a curator and cultural journalist. He publishes independently at https://substack.com/@joshm
