Amalgamate

For the balcony room on the first floor of the Syke manor house, Simone Haack and Patricia Lambertus developed their first joint installation. The title Amalgamate refers to a fusion of different materials, visual languages, and artistic techniques into a unified spatial composition.

The starting point of this work is the history of the site. The Syke manor, situated on the rural outskirts of the town, originally served to supply Syke Castle. Around 1800, part of the building complex was converted into the residence and administrative headquarters of the local forestry office. Against this backdrop, Haack and Lambertus address the theme of hunting—not as a documentary representation, but as a cultural, symbolic, and mythological field.

At the center is the figure of Diana, also known as Artemis: goddess of the hunt, the moon, and childbirth, guardian of the forest and the wilderness. She embodies protection, independence, a deep connection to nature, and the cycle of life and death. The installation explores these themes through historical references, contemporary image fragments, and atmospheric elements.

In Amalgamate, the distinct artistic languages of Haack and Lambertus converge. Patricia Lambertus works with collage-like spatial installations in which historical, social, and media images are transformed into new spatial contexts. Simone Haack develops a figurative visual language that employs realistic means without depicting reality; her figures appear as psychologically dense entities poised between outward presence and inner state.

Together, they create an installation-like pictorial space situated between hunting, myth, wilderness, and projection. Historical traces, painterly figures, and spatial collage elements combine to form an open composition in which nature does not appear as an idyllic counter-space, but rather as an ambivalent place of protection, desire, control, and transformation.