About
I make images, with my hands, head and body. My work is versatile, I work with different carriers for my images. In addition to performances and films, I make drawings, stills / photos, occasionally a sculpture, and I write. Usually they are performances that I make, intertwined with my life and experiences. They contain archetypal elements that are the key to connecting with the world of today. They arise in a different area than that of language. When the images are made, they rub against everyday reality, stripped of what does not matter, often poor, tormented, lonely. They become part of my language of imagination. I make poetry, I don't want to be unambiguous, there is room for interpretation and association. Through the imagination I look for connection from the other to me, and how the images are given a place in this.
When I was 8, I looked through the windows of the Pieter Breughel Institute in Veghel. I wanted to take a course in making images, but that did not fit in at that time and not in the environment where I grew up. Things had to be at least practical or useful. With the resources I had or could find, I made objects with which I created my own space. My uncle was a printer and often had strips of paper left over from cutting leaflets. I was allowed to have that, so I made long braids from it, which I stapled to a hat which I cut and glued myself, to imagine that I had long hair and could throw the braids over my shoulder. I was six, sitting at a table in the garden and letting my imagination in.
At the academy in Tilburg I was taught techniques and materials and I learned about art, which allowed me to increasingly shape my imagination and find a context in which I wanted to live and that gave me hope. I have been a visual artist since the late eighties. After graduating from the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, I mainly worked as a sculptor in the beginning, but soon (analog) photography was added. I took large black and white photos and used myself as a model for the image. The step towards performance was therefore logical. The direct contact with the audience in a performance fascinates me, as does creating the work in the dialogue, in the NOW. While my images used to be material and physical, they are now becoming increasingly immaterial, often only in the NOW (performance) and sometimes callable to the NOW (Film). I am the center or subject in the work, I as a person, with my hands, head and body, am or make the images. There are not many words in my work, it appeals to a different part of being than to the area of language.
In addition to performances and films, I make drawings, photos (stills) and I write. In 2009 I made my last large bronze sculpture (5 x 5 x 2 meters) in public space. Since then my work has become lighter in weight, less present as a physical object in the belief that the other can look and take an image with them, without it having to be materially located in the physical world. In the dialogue with the other, a work can be created that truly creates contact.
Just like before when I made sculptures in the accessible public space, I continue to look for communication with a diverse audience, performance moves on the same ground level towards the other and is an ideally suitable medium for this. Film can also be shown in very different environments than just an isolated visual art space. To illustrate, I performed for an Inuit community on an island near Sissimiut in Greenland, for a large popular audience in Ghangzhou in China. In Cape Town (S.A.) I made a work on the street together with Andrew Putter, but I also performed in the Reina Sofia in Madrid for an audience more interested in art. We made performances with the wolf in the winter at a large lake in the Carpathians, my film Echo the Now was also recently shown to the people on Texel in a cinema on the island and now is rewarded several awards internationally.
Collaboration
Because few performances were made in my surroundings at that time (1990s), I started initiating projects (curational artist). This led to the establishment of the Performance Foundation in 2000 and I have now organized 34 projects in collaboration with more than 350 artists at home and abroad, with Dutch and foreign artists. In 2003, together with Denys Blacker, we founded the cultural association Gresol in Madremanya, Girona in Spain, with the same objective. With Brian Catling (GB) I founded the international performance group Wolf In The Winter, we performed in England, Greenland, Transylvania, Spain, Germany and also in the Netherlands (Amsterdam 2010, 's-Hertogenbosch 2001 / 2024).
The nature of my practice is the search for connection, with my immediate environment, with the public, but also with what is happening in the wider world, looking over the borders and than back into my own space.
