Thomas Houseago Makes Ancient Objects Speak to Our Violent Present

The greatest artists are those who confront the history of humanity, questioning how to find a place and meaning within it and how they can contribute to its advancement in the present and the future. This is particularly true of those who work with the most ancient and primal media. Sculpture puts minds and hands in direct contact with the physical materials given by the natural world, as well as with a rich archive of forms accumulated over centuries. Some artists, Thomas Houseago among them, lean more heavily into this engagement with the past. Through his work, he deliberately explores the realms of the collective unconscious, resurfacing archetypal forms and memorial traces that have been shared and resisted over centuries of human making.

In June, during London Gallery Weekend, Observer visited Houseago’s latest exhibition, “Death’s Sacred Mirror,” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, where he has staged a rich cabinet of curiosities spanning thousands of years of sculptural history. Cycladic figures, rare Celtic artifacts, medieval alchemical vessels and works by modernist artists ranging from Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein to postwar names such as Louise Bourgeois and Lucio Fontana are presented in dialogue with Houseago’s own sculptures. Conceived as a personal archaeology of influences, the cacophonic dialectic of aesthetics in the room resolves into a polyphony of voices from history that Houseago treats as a physical inheritance to unearth and confront, rather than simply to honor and imitate.

We were lucky to visit just as Houseago was taking installation shots, and we were able to embark on a long, inspiring conversation about the show, his approach and its particular relevance at this moment in civilization. He described the London show as emerging from the aftermath of a breakdown and from his long-standing relationship with Dominique Lévy, who, he says, gave him total freedom in the gallery. This allowed him to create what he admitted is “a very heavy show.” It turned into, as he put it, a strange, dark journey of hope. “I was making sculptures in my head from these really weird, mythical things I had experienced during various states of my breakdown. Dominique kept asking me, ‘Where does this come from?’ and we began a discussion.”

Most of the works on view—his own as well as those of ancestors from different places and times—represent archetypal and totemic forms as vehicles for processing collective trauma and universal human emotions. The entire exhibition reflects his belief that contemporary violence stems, in part, from historical amnesia. By breaking all the usual rules for a solo show, Houseago wanted to recreate the experience of discovering art as a child—a period when art, music and images arrive without hierarchy to form a private world. “I always had this fantasy about ancient art as if it was my family, guiding me. It was in my fantasy, right? But it was a beautiful, powerful fantasy,” he shared. Art, for him, is tied to healing and to the possibility of changing traumatic behavioral patterns. “Art is a great place to work that out. It worked for me. Understanding that I’m still alive, that I can survive.”

From those reflections and beliefs, Houseago built what he describes as “a strange, dissensive family of works and presences”: ancient art, contemporary art, Van Gogh, Francis Bacon and unnamed objects whose makers are lost to history. “Ancient art really moves me because it does not have names. No one really knows who made that,” he reflected. The works exist beyond biography, leaving space for the imagination to build a fantasy around them.

Houseago thought art historians would hate it. Instead, the ones he interacted with were intrigued by this exercise in syncretic staging across geographies and time, revealing what is universal, what humans have always shared in their encounters with the world, their feelings and their fears. The show was realized in collaboration with Rupert Wace and Charles Ede Ltd., London, who helped source many of the precious antiquities Houseago included in the show. Wace even introduced him to objects and connections he had not considered, he explained, pointing to a 160-million-year-old Jurassic rock. “He saw my Cosmic Eggs and said, ‘How about that?’ We were like, ‘Yeah.’ Then the show started to take on its own life. Objects started vibing off each other, and you almost can’t stop.”

The title, “Death’s Sacred Mirror,” came from Houseago’s fascination with a rare polished black mirror, used by shamans as an instrument of self-reflection, confession, ego-loss and mortality. “That sculpture is used as a reflection of your own mortality. It kind of lives through you and lives past you,” he said. “There are objects in here that seem like empires collapsing—the British Empire, the wars—and yet they’re somehow still here… They live through us and past us.”

For the artist, the show also circles around the violence of the 20th Century and, especially, key questions about what happened to the body after the Second World War, after all that death and violence. He suggests that this remains unresolved: “I don’t think we’ve quite figured it out yet. We’re using technology and entertainment to numb ourselves from the potential of violence that we seem to keep doing, these patterns of trauma and violence.”

Several thematic strands structure the show: the prehistoric, where anonymous makers left forms we recognize as birds, cats or bodies; Houseago’s own cardboard figures, made domestically at home as a way of testing ideas; and major art-historical presences such as a 1913 drawing by Jacob Epstein of his Rock Drill. “The actual sculpture was destroyed, but it’s the first time the body and the machine are melded,” Houseago noted. “It’s a very A.I. image. It’s the fantasy of A.I.: we become machines, and we are automated in a weird way, even if we don’t know it.” Houseago sees it as a prescient warning of the threats posed by the mechanization of human life—technological utopias that risk turning into dystopias.

This is where, for him, working with his hands becomes crucial. The works in the show carry what he called a fetish quality of touch and making—the awkwardness of the human hand. He sets this against the machine-made image and the increasingly normalized machine-made artwork. But for Houseago, the machine is not the answer. The answer remains in us, in the body, in cardboard, in the hand and in the vulnerable act of making.

Venus and the mother figure recur as important presences in the show, tied to birth, origin and domesticity. Louise Bourgeois’s feminine figures and a rare Joseph Beuys Venus enter this constellation, paired with Houseago’s Female Standing Figure (2026) and a new edition of his Crystal No. 1 (2026), expanding the conversation around the generative power of beauty, grace and femininity.

The horses and animals in the show carry a more devotional charge: held, rubbed, carried in a pocket and lived with as calming, fetish-like objects. For Houseago, those kinds of objects are another version of the death mirror: something intimate, handled and almost devotional, bearing the trace of a life. All around, Houseago’s cardboard works extend the conversation across centuries, illuminating the fact that humans have asked the same existential questions for thousands of years. Some pieces on display are peaceful, some comic, some goofy, but all come from the private space of making and thinking at home, confronting the inner world, still searching for the essence, the soul.

Pointing to a horrific transfigured sculpture, he explained that it is an image of his own breakdown in 2020. During that period, he said, he lost nearly everything, including his mind. “I lived in another state, a psychedelic state. I would look in the mirror, and I would just see myself dead. I’d see this whole—bits of mine—it was horrific.” The person who helped save his life, whom Houseago described as a trauma genius, told him to make the image of it instead of fearing it. “You need to own it. You need to make it. You need to be able to look at it’, he told me,” Houseago recalled. “By painting and drawing it and working with him on that, it started to evaporate. He said, ‘Live with it now. You have it, and it will not need to show itself to you anymore.’”

On our previous visit to his L.A. studio, Houseago had explained that most of his sculptures begin as drawings. He draws on cardboard, cuts the forms out, assembles the drawings and then forms the drawing physically. From there, the works move through clay, molds, plaster positives and eventually bronze. In the show, many of them remain in a more raw, primordial and unfiltered stage of the first intuition on cardboard, while still looking like ancient artifacts, totemic idols or theatrical masks.

Houseago feels art carries something continuous through human experience. “There is something going through art that collapses time and collapses context, if you let it,” he argued. “We have always lived in a body. Since we have lived in a body, we have died, we have been sexual, we have loved, we have been scared, we have been angry, we have looked at the natural world with astonishment.” For him, the show is a way to understand this continuum and try to break the historical amnesia that is dangerously spreading today. “I think the reason we have Trump is that we have amnesia. The reason Ukraine keeps going on and on is amnesia. This is a human external solution for an internal problem, which is trauma. And when you get white men in power with trauma, they do it on a massive industrial scale.”

Houseago draws a connection to Goya’s Horrors of War, which he recently saw in Madrid. “You are amazed, but you are also devastated, because it looks like the news. Are we still doing this? And it is like, yeah, we are still doing it. We still think we cannot stop it.” He believes the solution won’t be found in technological progress or fantasies of Mars, but in an inner journey: learning to sit with discomfort without turning it into violence. “Why do we not do it in a creative way? Let us just make music together and talk about what we do love. It is that simple. It is just an inner journey,” he said. Even one day of inner work, he suggested, can begin to transform something. But capitalism, phones and contemporary distraction are built to keep people from stopping long enough to do that work.

In this sense, the exhibition Houseago has staged in London is both deeply personal and universally relevant—a journey of discovery that is equal parts art-historical and anthropological and invites us to look at how humans have, for centuries, confronted mortality, trauma and violence in similar ways. Over and over, they’ve found in art, if not an answer, a tool of imagination and creation that supports survival.

More in Artists