Statement
My work is driven by an interest in the process of making images and in how these become meaningful. As visual motifs I often work with material from art history. For instance, in 2009 I made an installation called A New Method, for which I used as a starting point the book A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape, by the 18th century artist Alexander Cozens. In the book Cozens explains how to employ ink blots in composing landscape drawings and paintings. One of the works in the installation was a series of hand-drawn copies of images from the book, presented as a set of slides. The ink blots inhabit a space between abstraction and figuration and thereby trigger the imagination. In my work I have always tried to find this moment in which an image starts being meaningful. This relates to my interest in the space a work offers to a viewer, both literally as an object, and mentally in its experience. I am especially interested in the notion of creativity, both as a social phenomenon and a driving force in making art. For me, it relates to the very concrete question of how to do something meaningful as an artist, as well as to a more discursive, theoretical background in which preconceptions about art are intertwined with complex social and political institutions. One of my main concerns in my practice has always been what to do as an artist – and more concretely what to draw. I gave up on trying to find a definitive answer. Instead I focus on the question itself.
I approach this question by looking into how to employ sculptural space, which for me has become inseparable from reflecting on how a work creates a potential for meaning. In my installations the space between the individual works is just as important as the works themselves. I see meaning as something fragmented which comes into being while the viewer moves through space. Previously the spatial element of my work mostly comprised furniture to present drawings on or in, like tables and show cases. More recently I also started using proper sculptural elements in my work. For instance for the work Mirror Maze I designed a metal frame-like object which both defined the space in which it was standing and suggested a viewing position from which one could look at a large drawing on a nearby wall. The object literally framed the drawing and could thus be used as looking device. For me it was crucial that the relationship between sculpture and drawing was non-specific and abstract. The use of the sculpture was not prescribed, it could be used to stand in, look at or out of, and to climb on. The drawing was very abstract as well, but for other reasons, I believe because of – paradoxically – its very specific visual motif: it was a hand-traced text from a patent registration of a mirror maze, made using an overhead projector. It uses language to describe a very concrete object, namely a piece of funfair architecture intended to create the illusion of endless space for its visitors. In the installation I see the sculpture and drawing as mirrored images in how they both play with space. The sculpture is a non-specific object offering a potential physical use. In the drawing the description of a non-existing space is intertwined with the materiality of the work itself. By combining non-specific and non-existing references with the materiality of sculpture and drawing, the work seeks to circumscribe a potential for meaning through a concrete experience of space. For me the question of how to do something meaningful as an artist is a matter of questioning the way in which one can employ and inhabit space.