The title Snakes and Ladders was chosen as a fitting context closely connected to the personal period during which this exhibition came into being—a time of reflection and revisiting patterns, behaviors, and choices.
Snakes and Ladders is a game based on chance, originally intended to carry moral lessons through decorative boards. Over history, from its origin in ancient India, that moral dimension has faded. Today, there are more ladders (ease) than snakes (challenges), shifting the balance of the game. The title responds to a previous concept for the exhibition, Doors and Brooms.
Interestingly, I have never actually played the game myself.
A recurring question in my work is how a material can support itself. The hanging mechanism is not only technical but also part of the object and my practice. I leave the object without a fixed destination for as long as possible, allowing it to shape itself according to a potential context. Conceptually, this involves the ‘performativity of hyper-independence’ and the role of a supporting structure. Historically, it revolves around painting with something versus on something. What does a material need to perform? And how does this, including the industrial history of technology, relate to my role as a maker? This influences my visual language, process, and practice.
Within the exhibition, there are several movements that explore these questions:
Blown glass and collaboration with Marc Barreda represent an attempt to bring volume and sculpture into my visual language. The self-supporting forms challenge the visual language by adding an extra dimension, creating a new hybrid language.
Doors and brooms are an effort to combine different materials and techniques into one coherent object. Normally, I work with a single material within an interchangeable network, but here I seek the connection between techniques.
The brooms stem from a personal need for new brooms. Settling into a home evokes a domesticated question: the tension between necessity and decoration.
Doors and brooms raise further questions about how material can support itself and each other, and what the bearing capacity of image is in contemporary visual art and the object. The balance between fundamental/ structural and ornamental/decorative plays an important role.
The relationship between foundation and decoration also appears in my drawings, especially with glass and felt. My drawings build color and form in a painterly approach, sometimes blurred into unreadable gestures. For this exhibition, I experimented with extracting more legible forms from digital images, creating a tension between abstraction and figuration.
This exhibition thus investigates the tensions and connections between material, form, context, and meaning, with the question of self-support and performativity as a guiding thread.