Back at work. Finally!
Took a while. Let it all sink in. Digest what happened before during and after the exhibition. The weeks towards and during the presentation of a new installation is a trip. A good and adrenaline injected trip. The period after the presentation is a lull, a valium injected state of ‘was this it?’. I know it and yet it always takes me by surprise because it is always slightly different. There is a tough auto rejection of my work, a ‘was this it, why can you not go on evolving, moving, not being ‘ a still life’?’ OMG, while writing this , I have the impression I have a Gepetto complex (don’t know if that exists but I like it), haha.’’ why can you not be a real boy, flower, thing. alive for ever and ever changing yet staying the same’’. This is so toxic and to avoid falling into this sulfurus pit I try (but fail) not to engage with past work at all for a while. And if I manage to stay out of Lucifer’s (or Gepetto’s) home, this lull is also very relaxing, because it is a vast and unexplored domain that stretches out in front of me. So in this confusing and contradictory state of mind I remained for a couple of months. Until, like in the old Greek plays (and if life is not a play I don’t know what it is), out of the sky there came three dei ex machina to save me out of the limbo. deus ex machina 1.0: I got offered a commission of a couple of sculptures. I can just make what someone actually WANTS! it is a couple of classical figurative clay sculptures and what is great is that, apart from the quite specific positions that the commissioner wants, I am relatively free. So the challenge is to make an Annabelle sculpture in a framework that is not Annabelle. I love challenges. No challenge, no difficulty, no pressure is no fun.
In the first framework, the freedom I take is ‘how will I make the work, meaning who am I as a maker, what is my role and what will it do to the sculpture, how will the sculpture come out if I am let’s say a kind of…’’witch’.’’
enjoy:
