Annabelle about Annabelle

How do you create your own story? Constantly reinventing yourself. Surprising yourself. I often call myself an image-making writer. I see every project I undertake as writing a book. You have an idea somewhere, a story you want to tell, something you want to talk about, and you know the broad outline, but all the sentences still need to be filled in, and you don’t know exactly which style best suits the telling of your story. That’s how I work. Project-based and intuitive. But then with images. That’s why it doesn’t always result in one work but many works, side branches that sometimes become an image in themselves, byproducts. The material needed to say what I want to say is the right material at that moment. Clay is the home base, but I also like to work with other materials such as PUR or plaster or paper. By working, gaining a broader perspective on what you are talking about drives me to keep going, a sort of quest. The representation of women throughout history and archaeological, natural history, and anthropological museums are my greatest sources of inspiration. Art treasures that have just barely or just barely not withstood the test of time can move me deeply. Temporality is the most frustrating and hardest concept of life to accept. I think all my work ultimately stems from that, from that frustration. There is a constant urge to go against it by creating work, and even work that cracks in the kiln or shows cracks during the making process, I will try to integrate into the final work.

Neva Lukic about Annabelle

Annabelle Schatteman – Cycles, Processes, Rituals

In the chapter Absurd Creation (Myth of Sysyphus, 1942) Albert Camus wrote: If the world were clear, art would not exist.

Regarding this, we should not be frustrated by the temporality of our lives, since this is what makes us and our human identity is drawn from the source of our mortal soul... Still, we remain frustrated. And so does Annabelle Schatteman, who as a true sculptor, finds the inspiration precisely in this paradox, marked on two sides by the ''violent act of birth and death.'' For this artist everything in between is a narrative, the moulded story of life, the way she perceives human existence in this world. Schatteman's main protagonist is figurative (feminine) sculpture, made out of materials like clay, PUR foam, plaster, porcelain, bronze, paper, papier maché..., sometimes partly constructed out of ready made elements, and in rare cases sculpture is counterpointed with other media such as performance or video installation. Her work is not openly conceptual since the process is not presented, but still, it is created through research – by reading anthropology, psychology, fairy tales..., and even writing a blog about the making of it. Schatteman's approach is very much science-fiction like, we can even name certain series of works ''(feministic) sculptural science fiction'', and it is important to emphasize that different ''episodes'' are sometimes interconnected, as a sort of ''saga.''
Not only on the storytelling level is Schatteman interested in processes or cycles, but also on the level of repeating patterns throughout her oeuvre. The pattern is what we inherit, and what has been imposed on us by our genetics, birth and by the society we live in. Thinking of the connection of all three, the artist took her grandfather's bronze tool which he used to make butter cookies, like petit beurre, and used it in several projects in order to make the print of the mask or representation of a mask.
Being permanently impressed by ''the continuation of life'' Schatteman in her own way tries to challenge the force of time, to keep, to repeat and to maintain life, to become, for a moment, ''the mother nature herself.''
Is this the point where the circle closes? Since we still do not have the power to bring sculptures or images into life, the only thing we can do is to maintain the repetitivness and cycles, to continue creating by always starting from scratch. 
Camus concludes The Myth of Sysyphus with the following sentences: Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Or Schatteman.

Neva Lukić