In my art practice I make installations and sculptures that consist of a combination of homemade and found objects. Whereas the former are the results of an intensive production process, the latter are spontaneous findings, carefully chosen for their extrinsic and sculptural properties. In turn, both the residuals of the production process and the visual (re)presentation of the practical steps preceding a result, can function as a basis or inspiration for new works. My artistic background is that of a sculptor and although I have a traditional method of working in terms of materials and their use (I want to ‘make stuff’), using this method of combining homemade and found objects, – and anything that happens in between – makes for an unforced, iterative method of ‘trial and error’, allowing unforeseen elements to become part of the work. Next to the spatial works, I have started lately to make drawings.
The subject of my work is the depiction of violence and cruelty towards human beings and the corporeal.
I draw my inspiration from various fictional and real life sources, such as images and stories from the news, horror movies, obscure sites on the Internet, books etc. The ambiguity between fictional and real life violence is what interests me; while the visual rendition could in fact be equal, the moral conception is entirely different. Through my works I am in search of the intersection point between these two, in a depicted mixture of fact and fiction. Even though my aim is to create balanced works in which the separate objects relate to and complement each other, the search for aesthetic beauty in the depiction of violence is not necessarily the most interesting to me, but rather the thoughts, feelings that I derive from imagining the act of violence itself.
I look at my installations through the eyes of an imaginary movie director, creating ‘scenes’ that allow me to raise a figurative screen between myself and my subjects, comparable to both the way images of faraway suffering reach us every day through media such as newspapers, television and the Internet and the over the top, graphical violence as seen in the fictitious field of horror movies and violent video games.