The path my work takes is set by my wish to explore in a poetic manner the intrinsic values of the material that creates landscapes: clay. I work with commercial clay as well as with the base material (clay, earth, dirt), which I collect for studio experiments or use on site.I am motivated to visualize the forces, transformation processes, and organization of clay by exposing it to water, heat, air, light and/or gravitation. Physics and chemistry play leading parts in my work process. In the project ‘Transition’ (1988/1989), for instance, I aimed at visualizing the quintessence of the ceramic process, the transformation of clay into stone.Most times, my projects do not culminate in objects but in temporary, sometimes transitory, pieces. Transcience was a an elementary aspect of the project ‘Suspension’ (1998/1999).
The dance of the clay sphere in the water basin and the sound of its disintegration were registered on camera.Interval of time also figures importantly in my projects. Time defines and transforms my attitude (viewpoint, acts, and experiences) during the inception. Surprisingly my observation is intensified by the often exasperating slowness of the project’s progress. It may take months before a significant change becomes noticeable. By then, the process’s rationale may have taken a backseat. This allows me to discover the visual possibilities of the work as is, and not as I had hoped or expected it to be. Finding what I did not seek created some of the key projects in my work.Over time, since 1977, I executed projects in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Finland. Yet in the fall of 2005, I discovered the high desert of New Mexico in the American Southwest. It was there that I with my Dutch colleagues Jeroen van Westen (eco-artist) and Gerco de Ruijter (kite-photographer) worked on the project ‘Cross References’. This project made me more aware of the necessity to let go premeditated ideas and concepts.
The different works I executed in my studio at the Santa Fe Art Institute as well as in situ were all directed by the circumstances I found on location. My goal became to have a minimum of interventions lead to a maximum of visual results, and to apply erasable interventions only. Thus details in the landscape and in the studio became main issues.The projects I do now are all born from processes. They are not ‘made’. It is my task to create, or provoke, those circumstances in which visualizations fall to me spontaneously. Working in the high desert has given me a strong feeling of freedom. No longer am I tied to specific locations, not even to the desert. Practically every location, whether inside or out in the open, is potent enough to become intense and start a process.I experience my knowledge of matter, collected over thirty years of working as an artist, as essential for the continuation of my ‘research’. The interaction of clay with minimal details in the landscape such as flow patterns, or subsoil minerals such as salt, make every landscape fit to be a location. Any information about the geological history of the landscapes is knowledge I keep in stock, for it is not my goal to recognize what I know or could know.
Land Art creators like Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson have inspired me intellectually, but not by their modes of operation – I see the might of bulldozers as too invasive. I find more inspiration in the anti-heroic work of artists like the Weinbergers, for they use base materials such as weeds. "Taking care of big and small, but especially all things tiny, unimportant, modest, inconspicious, becomes art" (Dieter Roelstraete in ‘Lois & Franziska Weinberger’).My work’s raison d’être is my attitude. This attitude of gathering knowledge, establishing viewpoints, setting into action, taking care, making observations, and noticing discoveries, is my foremost creative strength.
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