Funeral Home: North Sea

Jonat Deelstra is a Dutch visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores how humanity searches for its place within the natural world. Working across sculpture, film, graphic work, and installation, he creates narrative yet slightly disorienting environments that examine relationships between people, rituals, and ecosystems. Since 2022, he has been developing the long-term research project Uitvaartcentrum Doggerland, investigating how art and funeral practices might reshape our connection to the sea. His work has involved collaborations with organizations such as the Embassy of the North Sea and the Doggerland Foundation.

His sculpture project “Funeral Home: North Sea” proposes an underwater cemetery on the Dogger Bank, one of the North Sea’s most ecologically significant yet vulnerable areas. The work consists of handmade ceramic coffins and vessels designed to hold human remains or ashes. Their surfaces are carefully shaped to function as artificial reefs, creating ideal conditions for marine organisms to settle, breed, and grow. In this way, each resting place becomes both a memorial and a living structure that supports biodiversity.

The project directly engages with rewilding by linking human legacy to ecological restoration. By imagining the Dogger Bank as a sacred, protected space, Deelstra proposes a cultural framework that could help safeguard the area from pressures such as overfishing while fostering marine recovery. The transformation of burial sites into habitats embodies the idea of “new life from death,” highlighting cycles of regeneration within marine ecosystems.

Through “Funeral Home: North Sea,” Deelstra invites reflection on how rituals can evolve to support environmental care. His work suggests that rewilding is not only a scientific or policy process but also a cultural one – requiring new stories, symbols, and practices that reconnect people with the living systems they depend on.