My practice encompasses analogue film, glass and writing. With each of these, I work with light as subject, material and metaphor.
In and around the studio, I take my camera in search of an image. Various lenses, light-bending and refracting objects; lamps and projectors; the sun outside; shadows; colours… I scratch and paint film or douse it in various chemicals; I play the created footage at various frame rates until moving images turn into rhythms of still ones. There’s an element of play that allows for coincidence and intuition – it is usually in these surprises that the discovery of something beautiful lies. This process is exemplified by my 8mm projection work at the graduation show.
Glass came into my practice in the past year, and, similar to the camera and film, glass also works with acts of ‘looking through’ and simultaneous ‘looking at’. It is a medium that is always relational to the space and the light it captures. I first worked with this idea with a window hung over the lake at Piccardthof, catching the sunset. I’m building on a similar concept for one of my sculptures at the show.
While film and glass allow me to engage with light materially, it is often the metaphoric and lyrical that inspire my works initially, and I engage with this particularly in my writing practice. Poetry, various novels and essays ground me in the phenomenology of my work again. It is a way to reflect, comprehend, and muse.
My research was sparked by the re-reading of East of Eden by John Steinbeck, who reiterates the story of Cain. Cain experiences the first true severance from Eden, confronted with the evil within. He witnesses that he is not so different from the violent forces of nature that surround him. God marks and condemns him to a life of wandering and searching on that very earth, as an earthly being and body.
In Ecclesiastes 3:11 it is said that God put eternity into man’s heart, yet man can never know what God has done from start to end. Our body is material, limited and bound to earth. Yet we seem to yearn for boundless, immaterial things – love, glory, freedom, power… Much of humanity seems like an endless ricocheting between these two states. Being embodied is no easy thing. Yet the answer seems not to lie only with the mind. The price remains the very biological heart, for which we are both in search and in defiance. One catches a sun ripple in the palm and is simultaneously confronted with the notion of timelessness, the without-bounds, and the cruel limitation of earthly matter. A beam of light falls into a pair of eyes and is magically transformed into something one thinks and feels about. In witnessing and musing on such phenomena of light, these encounters are poetically extrapolated into paradoxes of yearning, ascending, and falling.
