‘Consistency’ used to be a word that scared me from following my heart and artistic ideas. ‘They’ made me believe that I had to choose. Now I choose to search for this within the different projects that I’m working on, by expanding the different approaches simultaneously with a crazy passion, and by working day and night. (By the way, nowadays it’s difficult to scare me...)
This way we can speak of totally different series of works, each with their own visual and conceptual individuality. The main projects are: Hairdrawings, textile sculptures, paintings, a conceptual - still growing - installation called “The Facehooker”, “Guipetta” and sideprojects like theatre and collaborations.
In my hairdrawings I use human hair and parafinepaper for tactile and minimalistic, fragile drawings. I play with words, humor and contrast to sew the thinnest lines into nearly invisible but sometimes three-dimensional work. Hair offers a wide range of connotations, history, sentiments and individual stories, and is at the same time cheap and strong, highly aesthetic material to work with. Used themes and concepts go beyond the gimmick of unusual material.
Before I started working with hair I made a series of textile sculptures. Sometimes the ‘textile’ link is the used technique like sewing. The knitted sculptures are mostly white, simple figures, started with a papier-maché base around which I sew customised wool hand-knitwork.
‘My body is against me’ is a series of small size paintings (30x30cm) (acryl on canvas). They are enlargements of negligible frustrations, pain or insecurity. By focusing on these visual ‘events’ on my body they start to look like the evidence of life of a martyr – which is, I assure you, higly exaggerated. This way I laugh at the way we, or at least I, tend to complain fast about nothing. At the same time it’s a reference to Frida Kahlo whose work got me, totally unexpected, into painting a couple of years ago. Of course her physically and emotionally dramatic life were rightly inspirations, whilst I blow up simple things like a blue spot into something horrible.
‘The Facehooker’ is a large continuously growing group of works, consisting of an installation (print-outs of my facebookwall, taped together with pink tape), texts, drawings, video-work, photographs, interactive ‘performances’ on facebook,... and the (un)visual creation of a strong but artificial-based network. Networking an sich, the changing social structures and codes and the connection with reality are some of the main themes in this project.
Another original way to enlarge this network can be seen in the project ‘Guipetta’. Guipetta is a growing group of little curator-actionfigures, made out of clay and mixed media. Like the father of Pinocchio I want my puppets to be alive. Thanks to the puppets I get to meet a lot of the curators. The work asks for reflection on the position of both curators and artists.
FYI is a series of little drawings and collages (15x15cm) based upon a virtual ‘love’ story that ended with a threat mail. For these works I used parts of the e-mails, text messages, my own feelings etc. As a group the work could be seen as a puzzle, apart they touch many topics connected to life, love, art, power, etc.
In 2009 I collaborated with theatre director Arnaud Deflem (Belgium) for our piece TRIO. I took care of the scenography, the graphic work, I made an animation film and a couple of new works inspired on the text.
Multi-talent Robert Quint (Germany/Belgium) invited me to his studio to create some new artworks togheter. Until now it resulted into more than 30 paintings of different sizes, maybe 300 drawings, a mural painting, sculptures, and most important: a lot of fun!
During the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven (NL) Freek Lomme (from Onomatopee, Van Abbemuseum and Your Space), invited me to collaborate with designer Alice Schwab (Switserland/The Netherlands). We created ‘COMMENT-LIKE-SHARE’, a living wall, based on Facebook and Networking.