Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas’s works are almost always a fusion of creation and destruction. For his most recent project, he combines gardening and conceptual art, creating a thought-provoking exhibition at Emalin gallery in London.

‘Finely chop the vegetables (beetroots, cucumbers and spring onion leaves)’ … Augustas Serapinas (b. 1990) is brewing up Lithuanian Cold Borscht in a greenhouse at Number One Holywell Lane, London. Despite the medieval sound of the address of his gallery Emalin, its glass walls overlook a truly urban Shoreditch, a junction of roads and tracks that would have kept Leon Kossoff (1926–2019) happy. Serapinas is well known for cleansing the timbers of rural shacks with fire and then rebuilding. He has also rescued the skeletons of three greenhouses from central Vilnius, only to erect them in a different format. His dismantling and rebuilding emphasise the constant change in humankind’s relationship with the environment. What the hell are we doing to the earth? Well, you can come and taste what Serapinas’ is doing at the end of this exhibition – he is serving up a soup.

The broad beams of the country houses are singed and sealed charcoal black. Some have been hollowed out like primitive canoes. Earth fills the carved-out holes, so the once proud tree trunks look like water troughs converted into raised street flower beds. I visited the gallery on day one, so one could see no sign of the beets or potatoes (which are traditionally eaten with the soup), but other seedlings had broken out of the earth. The artist/gardener/cook has planted flowers, just in the anticipation of their colour and form, but if the gallery staff have the necessary green fingers, they will produce the herbs as well as the vegetables (coriander, dill, parsley, lemon balm and mint). ‘When I think about planting, I think about people,’ St Augustas confesses to me, and as in a monastery garden he has bribed the workers by growing camomile for their tea.

While the wooden planter construction fills the centre of the room, there are two other, even more typical Serapinas artworks in the gallery. He sees architecture ‘not as final structure but as a set of elements’ …. ‘Once the roasted vegetables are cool transfer them to a blender,’ reads the recipe for the soup. The architectural echo is that once the building starts to lose its point save its elements by placing them in a different situation. Two charred window frames and structures are placed on the inner gallery walls, rather as if they are blind onlookers to the changing world.

Serapinas is your archetypal modernist. He is not that different from the child in the playroom. He comes in and knocks down the structure that was there before and examines all the bricks and re-assembles them in a new vision. But, of course, that does not satisfy for long, so he knocks it down and starts again.

Seeing the rows of small sprouting plants in their beds made me think of the Anglo-Polish artist Andrzej Jackowski (b. 1947), who spent the first eleven years of his life living in a Nissen Hut in a Welsh refugee camp. He has made many paintings which depict his father who invariably seems to be floating, almost Chagall like, ungrounded. His father had been a Polish General in World War II and though he spent the rest of his remaining days in Britain, he never properly settled. As soon as he moved to a new place, he liked to put down radishes, as they were the quickest thing to sprout roots. As I told Serapinas about this, I realised that almost the opposite was true with him.

As a true Modernist, Serapinas is a believer in constant change. He first started using sheds on a residency in Newfoundland in Canada. He was on Fogo Island, which as one of the first jots of land for thousands of Atlantic miles, traditionally survived on fishing. In recent times the fisherman population has radically eroded, so many fishing huts are redundant. The sheds are an important part of Fogo’s cultural heritage, but most of them have been converted into workshops or stores. Augustas explains: ‘I learnt that one of the sheds was going to be torn down.’ After he was given permission to dismantle it, he heard that the hut already had had three different functions. ‘I built another version of it – and called it ‘Four Sheds’, as my artwork was the fourth version of the shed.’

Serapinas is not an architect. As the two window frames in the exhibition proclaim he is interested in the parts, in the details that can be re-used, not in a functional way, but rather showing their limits, what they can and what they can’t do. The Modernist critic, Greenberg, would love these relics. Greenberg proclaimed that painting was flat and should not be seen as a window on the world. Serapinas has gone further and shown that even windows can fail to be windows!

Emalin’s massive windowpanes overlook a Gotham city like environment; this meant that it was a ‘natural’ place to turn it into a greenhouse. Serapinas’ sheds and houses always come from rural settings, but as a city dweller himself he is fascinated with the intense relationship between the house and garden.

Serapinas’ world is about the constant battle and sometimes fusion between creation and destruction – a rich fertile zone for artists. He shows both the joy of looking at a decaying isolated dwelling in rugged country and the sense of satisfaction of reassembling this in a different form for a different moment. I leave the conclusion to my fellow Alistair, the Canadian writer Alistair Macleod, whose stories define the lives of the Scottish settlers in Newfoundland. They come from his masterpiece, ‘No Great Mischief’. “Perhaps that’s why he became so interested in history, […] He felt that if you read everything and put the pieces all together the real truth would emerge. It would be, somehow, like carpentry. Everything would fit together just so, and you would see in the end something like ‘a perfect building called the past.’ Serapinas is, of course, just as interested in the present and future.