memories of the landscape
context and meaning. Digging at an excavation in the streets of Hoorn: to get the mud of the stones and bones and make the structure clear, objects are getting their form, sometimes beautiful. But they are still juat forms to me. Even so, I’m going home by train with a plastic bag with bones, what if the people in the train knew…. Later I learnt: it might be part of a house-offer, the combination, a deposit, of a few things: bones (4 different animals), coal, a metal ring and a piece of glass; they had a special meaning to the 17th century human being.
The memory of the landscape, what did people do, signs of culture through time. Working at the excavation in Hoorn confronted me with the question around houseoffers: against what did people want to protect themselves, then and now?? In contrast to the present, nature was a much stronger thread, but what if the ice keeps going on melting and the dikes aren’t as strong as they make us believe they are? Is there enough faith in science? Do we need more insurance?
It also confronted me with a layer of burnt material underneath the floor. And burnt wood/coal: a result from a blacksmith fireplace. Especially this burnt reduced material was for me the start of a new series. I try to interweave, to integrate, old and new. To work with these pigments that comes from archaeological excavations, my painting materials refer to the past landscape. I will give it a new form inspired by the questions: Where does this material come from? Where is it used for? What are the stories we know and what does it tell me? I use that old material to paint and arrange my thoughts on canvases and transparent cloth. Working with this old material asked me the question: how did they make paint in the earlier days. So nowadays, I’m making paint with Arabic gum or egg as a binder. It is more vulnerable, but that is part of the expression of my work. Works of long ago with these materials still exist; they have past into our time. With these old methods, from buried materials and themes, I try to bring the past into the present. Different layers, thoughts and vulnerability are what I want to show in my paintings.