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Artistic inquiry
My artistic inquiry revolves around the relationship between space, time, memory and perception. I am interested in how places become familiar to us, how they continue to exist within us after they have changed or disappeared, and how what is absent can continue to influence what is present.
I understand a place not as something fixed, but as something continually shaped by time and experience. What we encounter in the present can carry traces of what was once there, alongside what is remembered or imagined.
The recurring image of the house has become important within this research. Rather than using the house simply as a symbol for home or memory, I am interested in it as a structure through which memory can take shape. Rooms, thresholds, windows, darkness, inside and outside provide an architecture in which experiences can be situated, displaced and reconstructed. The house does not simply represent memory; it can become a structure through which memory is continually reorganised.
Inhabiting
Spending time in a place has become an important part of how I work. Rather than arriving with a fixed idea of what should be made, I allow the work to develop through being there. Over time, a relationship emerges between the place, my experience of it and the work as it unfolds. Architecture, atmosphere, encounters and everyday rhythms can all influence the direction the research takes and the forms the work begins to assume.
I do not see a work as separate from the environment in which it is made. A painting, film, text or spatial work can absorb something of the conditions in which it develops. Its boundaries are therefore not necessarily limited to its physical frame or form; what surrounds it can become part of how it takes shape.
This is why residencies have become particularly important to my practice. They allow observation, making and inhabiting to take place within the same environment over an extended period of time. As this relationship develops, a place can gradually shift from being the location in which work is made to becoming one of the materials through which the work itself develops.
This way of working became increasingly important through The Familiar. At De Vindplaats, working within the everyday environment of the school and together with children showed me how a place can be continuously reconstructed through lived experience, conversation, drawing, playing and building. During The Familiar – Part II, this relationship with place became more physical and immersive. Spending several months inside a former military bunker, its architecture, darkness and sense of isolation gradually changed both how I worked and how I perceived the space. Experiences within The Black Shed, for example, found their way into drawings made without sight, paintings, installations and writing.
I am curious about what happens when a relationship with a place is sustained long enough for observing, inhabiting and making to become intertwined. A residency, in this sense, becomes more than a period in which to produce work. It creates a situation in which the environment and lived experience can actively shape the artistic process, while the practice itself can change through sustained engagement with a place.
Thinking through space
I increasingly approach an exhibition as a temporary constellation in which works, space, light, sound and people come together for a particular period of time. The relationships that emerge between these elements become part of how the work is experienced.
For me, exhibiting is also a way of thinking through the work, but this process can begin long before an exhibition takes shape. When I inhabit a space for a longer period of time, I can gradually bring works into it, move them around, juxtapose them and live with the relationships that emerge. These arrangements do not have to be resolved immediately. By encountering them repeatedly over time, I can observe how the works act upon the space and how the space, in turn, changes the way I see the works.
The space becomes a place in which connections can be tested and allowed to develop. Works made at different moments can temporarily exist beside one another, while images, objects, sound and architecture can enter into relationships that I could not necessarily have anticipated beforehand. In this sense, arranging work in space becomes part of the process of making and thinking.
An exhibition can emerge from this process as one temporary state of the practice. It brings certain relationships into focus for a period of time, without necessarily fixing them. When that constellation dissolves, the works can continue, return to the studio, change, or enter into different relationships elsewhere.
Different states of a process
This idea of different states also extends to the works themselves. Just as a subject can shift through different media and approaches, a work does not necessarily remain fixed in the form or moment in which it first appeared. I do not understand an artwork as belonging to a single moment in time. Works can remain open and return years later: a painting may be painted over or altered, a drawing may reappear within an installation, or an earlier work may enter into a new relationship with something made much later.
Because of this, I increasingly resist presenting my work as a chronological sequence of completed objects. The year in which a work was first made does not necessarily mark its completion, nor does it define its place in time. Different periods can accumulate within the same work, while new contexts can shift how an earlier work is perceived and understood.
My practice develops through this process of returning, layering and reconfiguration. Images, materials, notes and experiences move between works and projects, sometimes disappearing for a period before resurfacing in another form. Rather than replacing what came before, new work can exist alongside it, alter it, or bring something within it back into view.
I think of these works as different states within an ongoing process rather than fixed endpoints.
Moving image allows me to work with duration and with experiences that cannot be contained within a single image. Photography often begins through observation, as a way of looking at and collecting fragments of a place. Sound interests me particularly when it escapes its source: travelling through a space, overlapping with other works and making something present without necessarily making it visible.
Writing can continue an experience in yet another direction. Notes and fragments often begin while I am working or inhabiting a place and develop alongside the visual work, sometimes moving towards fiction, reflection or publication. A fragment can remain unresolved, return much later, or form a connection with an image or experience from another moment.
Different ways of experiencing
Each medium I work with offers a different way of approaching, translating and communicating experience. I am curious about how these different forms of perception can exist alongside one another, and how moving between them can shift the way something is experienced.
Painting remains particularly important to me because of its immediacy. I think of it as a kind of subjective imprint: not a record of what a moment looked like, but a trace of how it was perceived, experienced and transformed through making.
make,
think,
read,
do,
watch
