Lost Tablet Essaim Sculpture

Jan van Schaik is an artist and architect based in Melbourne. He is the director of MvS Architects, a researcher and senior-lecturer at RMIT Architecture & Urban Design, founder of +Concepts, author of the Lost Tablets artwork series, and the design director of creative sector strategy and advocacy consultancy Future Tense. Making art about architecture, and vice versa, Jan is engaged in the governance and communities of both. Arising from an interest in the complex relationship between human beings and their environments, Jan’s work explores the cultural and societal elements of architecture, and then expresses intuitive spatial discoveries in the coded geometric and spatial languages of the built environment.. His artworks, and his designs of prototypical public and private buildings have received numerous awards, and been published in Australia and internationally. Jan is the founder of +Concepts, a presentation and performance series exploring the insights practitioners have into their own creative and cultural practices. It has hosted over 120 performances from Australian and international practitioners in metropolitan and regional venues in Victoria, NSW, Queensland, Western Australia, and the ACT. Jan’s Lost Tablets project is a series of art works which explore the mysteries of human existence by exploiting tensions between a universally recognisable children’s toy and the grammar of architectural symbols. The works have received honorable mentions for art and architecture awards and featured in the inaugural Quarantine Art Fair in January, and Melbourne Design Week, and were displayed in the virtual Italian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021.