ARTIST STATEMENT

Often architecture is used to naturalise larger social narratives. By decontextualising familiar forms I can warp their practical purposes towards a collapse of normativity and binaries; unfurling anomalies from the fractures and toppling the biases in the fragile ‘logic’ which governs spaces.

I create objects, photographs and interactive installations aiming to train the viewer’s eye to recognise liminal moments of suspension encouraging choices of change rather than a continuation of the expected.

‘Liminality’ was coined by anthropologists to denote the in-between state within rites of passage. Over the course of history the liminal has been suppressed from being a vital part of life for individual and community growth, to being seen as a dangerous and undesirable space. Liminality, the centre that divides two binaries moved to the peripheries of our society. This neglect of transitional spaces harvests an anarchic undergrowth and the liminal becomes a portal which can be utilised as a tool for resistance.

The biopolitical use of architectural space and the definition of nature pushes people into the margins who fit neither category under dominant systems of logic. A lot of my previous work involved a juxtaposition between nature and urban architecture. Through displacing liminal architectural components such as doors in open green landscapes, I attempt to rephrase the liminal as a space of dwelling, creating a third space. I have introduced the bodies’ movement through space as another dimension to the undoing of either/or mentality. Inner vs outer, portrait vs landscape, body and environment as manifold and not opposed to one another, so a large part of my work is meant to be interactive. The renewed novelty of viewing quotidian objects and spaces out of context invites the audience to consider their perception of the world around them, and what they see as “normal” and “strange.”

Recently my art practice has started to shift, incorporating an aesthetic of collapse. Instead of bringing architecture into nature, I have started an investigation of nature as a type of architecture, and to look for natures subtle resistance towards human intervention and definition. The art piece “moulting manifold” is a body latex cast, draped onto a large piece of decaying tree. Both the tree and the body latex cast talk about collapse and refusal. The tree, a refusal to cooperate within the neatly curated artificial Dutch landscape. The body, as if shed like snake skin, talks about a refusal of the gender/sex binary. A definition of ones gender lies in ‘Western’ Society squarely within the realm of visual queues. The work aims to create an alternative narrative, where self determination is the defining factor of ones gender identity.  

A trained eye can recognise the liminal within almost anything, as it is all around us. However, through the way in which power structures have situated it within the outskirts of society we rarely recognise such an opportunity when it occurs. Instead of walking the well-trodden forest path, that has appeared through countless of feet walking countless of times on the same soil, the more rewarding paths lie on either side of the straightest direction.