Installation - Childhood - The Swing - Sommeil - Upstairs - The Curtain - Feuilles Volantes - Theatre set

Here’s a link to the 360° virtual gallery that the Art Academy put together!

My very first intention for this Grad Show was to present my work as ‘a world in which the audience could walk in’. I think it was the idea of reversing the scale: I’m naturally drawn to really small works which offer a sense of intimacy, a little world one can hold in their hands. Here I aimed for the opposite and I do see how it can look like a bit of a departure. It was indeed a first time creating installation work, but in my guts it only felt natural: never I had thought that the 2D surface was the only space to create within nor that the edges of the canvas were actual boundaries. Not that calling myself a painter was limiting me to a medium. And I know myself as a kid would not have bothered with any of that and simply play and create in the direction that my imagination wanted to take me.

Regarding the theme, I’m still exploring the period of childhood, and particularly from the view point I’m at today. Thinking about what it is to look back on it. Not necessarily in an autobiographical way but as a symbolic space and time. What was there that is no longer here? What are the feelings raising in me when I recall this past? How to tap into memories, again not the factual ones but the sensations around them. Similar to some dreams that leave more of an emotional impression than a clear narrative, I am keen to see what memories can evoke in our present rather than what they were in the past.

All of that feeds into another fascination of mine: perceptions. The simple idea that nothing is a truth, nothing is a fixed reality. I wanted to create work that could hold space for those paradoxical interpretations to coexist at once, to move through time or differ depending on who is looking at it. It was my intention regarding what I wanted the finished work to offer, but it also felt really important in terms of process. I was interested in not knowing what the work was exactly about, not having an answer or an explanation for it. I worked with my guts and accepted some lack of clarity.

The Staircase motif had been with me for some time too. I'm sure I'll pursue other paths later on but for this time with Upstairs I decided to use this chest from my childhood and open its drawers so they'd morph in steps. Imagining this little girl at the top, having climbed all the way to look for some kind of escape to her sadness. She's unfortunately facing a wall but that also might be for the best, she's alone but at least she's not too exposed, she has ways to hide. Once can trace back her movement when noticing the sort of breadcrumbs left behind. There's also little drawing on clay, echoing paintings on the wall, and that might suggest memories or the power of chaneling things creatively. 

I thought about children and their capacity to hide in plain sight. From a grown-up point of view it might be amusing to see feet sticking out a curtain, half-mocking the kid's lack of self-awareness. But I see it as a super-power, when it only takes closing one's eyes to find a solution of escape. That's what I wanted to explore in The Curtain. The two figures here are probably one and the same meeting from different moments in time. I think they're here to look after one another. It might be that the little one has some keys that the older one has forgotten. In this piece again there's a suggestion that creative expression can be one of those keys.

The whole work tunes into vulnerable feelings, which felt challenging towards me and the pieces themselves. Curating the space, creating a kind of theatre set for those feelings to be safely exposed within was important. Having them grouped together through this body of work and in the physical space was important and almost necessary, as if individual pieces were gaining strength from being close together, as a team. This way it's also less about independent pieces but more about the space in between, the dialogue that it encourages, the sum of them together. It was therefore important to curate the space so a thing would echo the next; the little paintings mimicking the staircase, the fabric and visual motifs running from one installation to the other, a sense of movement, time and space.

I wanted to create work that oscillates between various states, moods; some narratives that do not need to be fixed by language. In his poem 'On Children' Kahlil Gibran writes 'You may give them your love, but not your thoughts'. I really resonated with it. Of course I'm the happiest when the audience fills in the blanks with what makes sense for them, but I also love the idea that the work doesn't need any fixed meaning pinned to it - neither by me nor anyone. My feeling is that the piece knows for itself what's happening in its little world, and we're just getting a snapshot of it. It wouldn't matter for us to be 'right' in the way we project ourselves into the work, but to take it as an opportunity to feel empathy, to notice our common ground and maybe to reflect back on ourselves.