Artist statement
My work investigates different facets of trauma, both on an individual and systemic level. Through it I explore a foundational query:
Can traumatic events also serve as beneficial catalysts, gateways to profound realizations having to do with power and choice?
While researching trauma began from a personal history, the impact of traumatic events is omnipresent in culture at large, which fuels my artistic explorations even further.
As a child, I lived through a near-death experience while undergoing heart surgery. Experiencing that visceral connection between life and death informed the way I work today. I understood at an early age that opposing forces can, and often do, co-exist. It initiated an inquisitorial approach to contradictions and inspired an artistic-somatic practice. Integrating art making with meditative (felt-sense) practices allows me to come face to face
with my mortality, and the fear, pain, vulnerability, resilience, life-force and joy it invokes.
External forces shape inner landscapes and I believe that, while more nuanced, the same can be said vice versa.
Dichotomies may initially appear contradictory - notions such as weakness as a source of strength or beauty that encompasses crudeness -
but they can form a symbiotic relationship. By transforming these confrontations into a creative process, I seek to find agency, balance and release.
My work is grounded in the idea of Symbiosis. It's multidisciplinary in every aspect, from the mixed-media materials all the way to how they are made and where they are being exhibited. This also facilitated the decision to work in two parallel fields – the ‘white cubes’ and the public spaces.
In both arenas, the works are handmade, tactile, and conscious of their space. In the streets, they’re created as a performative action, reacting to
a specific location and point in time. In the studio, the canvas is laid on the floor and the marks are intrinsically connected to the body’s sensations
and movement.
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Breakdown of series:
The early Paintings ("Red Heart", 2007/8 and 2009) are naïve drawings of bodies and situations, subtle yet disturbing. Minimalist figures floating
in white spaces. With time, layers appear ("Illusions & Reality", 2010-2012 and 2013), representing the struggle to resolve past, present and future.
In these years I practiced a slow Sisyphean process, in which I was working for months on each piece.
Then a change took place, and my practice shifted into a dance-like rituals. ("Release", 2014-2016). These paintings were done in one continuous session. Each session took between a day to three days of working continuously.
The Serendipity Experiment 2017-2021
Between 2017 to 2021 I was immersed in an experimental performance. Together with my partner I traveled across the USA, over 100,000 km (60,000 miles), creating site-specific works in public spaces, daily.
Living on the road for four years (of which two in the pandemic), all the while dedicating myself to “the unknown” as a guiding tool, herald another big shift in my process. It changed the way I perceive stability, home, possessions, necessity. It altered the way I lived and subsequently, the way I created.
The Unimaginable Horizon 2022-2023
Thus, my return to the studio in late 2021, uncovered the tantalizing realization that this journey of serendipity, fundamentally changed my work. Inspirations and techniques that I had previously relied on now felt rusty, irrelevant. I couldn’t just pick up from where I left off, but rather, had to allow the full breadth of my experiences to manifest directly onto the canvas. Free of the need to adhere to one "coherent" idea, an uninhibited creativity was unleashed. So far, I’ve painted fifty paintings, intuitive works that represent a form of cartography – to places within and without, familiar and unknown –they can be read as maps to blocked paths and new roads.