Goele De Bruyn’s works, often containing elements from the immediate domestic environment, deal with a variety of formal and human concerns. By juxtaposing or overlapping functionality and the non-functional, the familiar and the strange, or by unifying them in their contradictions, her works are sometimes absurd or slightly comical, but are always marked by a specific emotional tension. The uneasy ‘being’, the melancholy and absence of the hybrid object reveal the works themselves as cultural constructions. The principles with which meaning is constructed are related to the staging of the works. Elements from earlier works are often reused, copied, relocated, altered, disguised. The work traverses different periods, its character contaminated according to the environment it infiltrates. In this way, Goele De Bruyn always again constitutes a mental space for every audience. Objects and environment often form a reassuring and disturbing whole. Disorientation is her point of departure. Once one has adapted, doubt is again renewed along the path of interpretation; there is a play of ‘disappointment’ in opposition to every expectation. She does not so much reveal the idyllic or touching aspects of the objects as their potential to become something else. The brute familiarity of the objects that appear are alienated from their referent, giving rise to a turbid, sometimes invisible or ghostly retranslation of the sign referred to.