part seven
My work often is concerned with art as experience, combining the
conceptual with the physical. In Memorials, the viewer first
encounters a plaque with the text of a story about a feminine spirit's
encounter with a garden, which clothing behind as a sign of mercy
(memory).
Memorials (Gedenktekens),
Het Zuiderpark, The Hague, 1998.
Here the art experience is a combination of the story, the garden and the tile memorial. more about "Memorials"
In the computer installation, Mycelium, I was interested in undermining the boundaries between an artwork and the viewer (and by analogy the individual and society). Behind a window-like opening, visitors could see an image (a composite of one of the art works by the other artists in the exhibition, with a close-up of one the people I live with). Clear instructions informed them that they could choose any image to interact with by typing words over the image. Two printed images then appeared from a slot. One image was a random image with their texts placed in another order over it. The other was the one they had interacted with. Each visitor chose one image to keep and the other was left to become part of a mushrooming installation.
The intention of the line of images and texts, the most visible part of the exhibition was not just to extend that moment of interaction into the surrounding public space but also to show a growing material manifestation of the exhibition itself; the art works and my personal interaction with them on the computer, and the visitors' interactions and presence in that time and space.
The visitor could create their own 'mycelium' (organic system) and share their part of the story.
Making Salt made with Gaudi Hoedaya and Sarah Buist began
as a website and then evolved into a performance. The website (http://www.
geocities.com/ SoHo/Square/1079) has a database of images that change
each time the viewer clicks on "filter". They are images on the
theme of filtering information in our world. People were ushered
in to sit next to each other in a central space towards the back,
while I sat in front of them typing text which was projected onto
five small screens in the front half of the lecture theatre. There
was a large video projection on the front wall of various hands
filtering and playing with salt. The effect was that the changing
words seemed to move in the space in front of the changing images
and also to fuse into them. While I was typing the 'filtered' texts,
which were to do with our senses, history, politics, the spirit
and science. Sarah & Gaudi poured salt into the palms of those seated
at the end of the rows and asked them to pass this on (and the salt
was filtered as it was passed on).Ghandi claimed India's right to define itself by extracting salt from the ocean. This performance combined textural and visual references to the process of filtering, where everyone was left with salt on their hands. What I have found hardest about living in the Netherlands is that life seems so catagorized here. I use my children in my art and in my art-making process not 'just' because I am a mother, but because I am convinced that they are part of the real world and my art is about the 'real' world!
more about "Making Salt"
Big Ones, consists of two larger than life-size translucent
photo-images of children who could be posing or playing. Their gestures
are ambiguous. One stands on one leg holding his head in his arms
and the other is bent over, feet wide apart, about to roll a rock
over the sand. The title refers not just to size, but also to telling
'big ones' -stories.
more about "Big Ones"
Wrapping for a marginal citizen is a 12 metre long cloth
with 24 identical images of my 6 month old son staring directly
at the camera. The various texts under-neath each image 'read' as
a sort of monologue-come-dialogue. They reflect comments made to
me when I had a baby with me on a train, in a gallery, or on the
street. It is also a piece about how I feel as a foreigner in The
Netherlands some days.
more about "Wrapping for a Marginal Citizen"
In the piece Mutability (1993), I took a snapshot I made in
the Louvre of my husband and son and presented it in a form so that
the physical image 'mutates' in its visibility as the light source
changes. My starting point was resistence to the idea that motherhood,
or sainthood, was something set in stone.
more about "Mutability"In another work, Virtue of the Rose, I was examining the associations between what we call an 'ideal' and what we call a 'characteristic', and in particular I used the names of the Bahá'í months, such as ' Loftiness', 'Splendour', 'Questions', 'Words', etc, as starting points. Our months, each nineteen days long, are also attributes for the divine. They are ideals and characteristics.
So I took these words, changed some, added some others and placed them over the image of an open rose. The rose is a symbol of ideal love and for me, a fitting symbol for the divine, because in the Bahá'í writings, ‘love’ is repeatedly stated as the source of all things. It is ‘love’ that attracts, and ‘love’ that inspires. Bahá'u'lláh wrote that his first counsel for us is to "Possess a pure kindly and radiant heart". I engraved the text "Virtue of the rose" into the deep frame to literally imbed it in the framewhich symbollically gives the image a context. The word, virtue, comes from the old English, 'virtu' which meant an inner strength or characteristic, while today it means a 'good' quality. more about "Virtue of the Rose"
I have often wondered how one could make an artwork which symbolised the soul. The sculpture, Parable of the rich fool, is an attempt at this. The work consists of five polished transparent resin house forms raised slightly above the ground and arranged in a semi-circle. If you stand directly above each 'house' a text can be read refracted through the roof. If you move, the text disappears and the house appears both empty and full. It is a solid piece of resin but there is nothing to see. The text is the biblical 'Parableof the rich fool' which tells of a man who built houses to fill with all his possessions, but at the end had nothing when God called for his soul.
Tulips
from Istanbul, is a piece about being here in the Netherlands.
The tulips appear to be of glass, in varying shades of orange,
and hang from the ceiling.
The aesthetic experience is a combination of touching or playing and a few historical facts.
The tulip was imported into the Netherlands and Germany from Turkey around the year 1600, at roughly the same time as the House of Orange became the Royal House of the newly formed nation of The Netherlands.
On the postcard relating to this work I have incorporated a quotation from the Qur'án, "It is not a tale invented, but a confirmation of what went before it..." Surah Yúsuf 111
This chapter of the Qur'án refers to progressive revelation. This is a concept that all religiousleaders or prophets come from the same source and are part of the same eternal religion. Here I connect this Moslem and Bahá'í view of religion to that cultural symbol. The tulip was never a found object, it came from somewhere, and in this instance, that somewhere was a Moslem society. more about the "Tulips from Instanbul"
the medium
