What can people expect from your upcoming show at Tatjana Pieters Gallery?
When I was thinking about the first new ideas for this show, I was in the middle of moving from one place to the other. I was leaving Berlin to make a new start in the Netherlands, closer to my family. Being in transit means letting go of the old before you can relate to the new. You enter in a state that I started calling “the space in between”. Expectations and a vision of how things might turn out to be was the force that kept me going.
The space in between never stopped me from working, which has turned this moment into a reality. The works in my upcoming show appear silent; there is neither spectacle nor entertainment. The works whisper about how things connect, become one, find their place and are never incomplete. It’s about trusting and peace with those elements in life we cannot control. It’s about embracing them as a path that leads to the unexpected.
This is your sixth exhibition with the gallery. As you work from show to show do you tend to create new series with a clean slate or is your process a continuous development?
My work is a continuous development. The question about values in life is always there and never stops intriguing me. Our environment is in constant change. To grow means to live and to develop. I can’t see my artistic actions in any other way.
Your works often consist of multiple materials—many pre-used. How do you work with these? Are you quite methodical in collecting, or are you very led by the pieces that you happen to find?
The pre-used objects relate to the question about how to value. To recycle materials means that they grow into something new. Nothing in life is without value to me, if you look closely there is always an energy captured. I don’t believe there are inferior materials. To discard pre-used materials is a lack of imagination. I am led by the pieces that I happen to find. I like the unexpected part that comes to me. As an artist, my ideas and vision bring me to a certain point in creation, mostly it is the unplanned and unexpected that lifts it into its final state of existence.
What is it about marble that especially interests you?
Marble reminds me how brief human life is. Marble is ancient and always unique in its pattern. There is never a second copy.
There is a fragility in a lot of your works, sometimes the materials and connection points are very fine, and sometimes well-used. Can you tell me a bit about this?
The connection points symbolize my feelings about change and transit. If we find ourselves in a moment of change, it is a complex reality to deal with. The choices we have to make are the fine connections that lead us through this complexity. How materials connect in my work refers to how events in life occur. Sometimes with doubt and hesitation. Sometimes clear and simple.
‘Vertical Horizon’ runs until 30 April at Galerie Tatjana Pieters. tatjanapieters.com
