Emile Gostelie (1957, Amsterdam) investigates the reality that lies beyond our perception. He calls himself an artistic researcher who couples inspiration from science with the artistic freedom to explore the unseen. He works mostly with photography and is mainly focused on a long-term project to discover the full potential of one photo of a haystack. Through deconstruction, assembly, and manipulation he tries to discover meanings this one photo contains but does not show. As part of this process he questions the value of reality as we perceive it, explores our hunger for understanding and purpose, the role of imagination and play and his personal obsession with discovering.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I explore what lies beyond our perception, combining scientific concepts with ar5s5c freedom, play and intuition. In my long-term project “Haystack”, I use theories from thermodynamics to investigate transformations of one photo of a Haystack.
A few years ago, I took a photo of a Haystack. When I first saw the Haystack, it took my breath away. It gave me a glimpse of monumental structures, of myths and ancient 5mes, of seductive greatness and ruins. Although the Haystack is long gone, my longing to discover the mystery of what this one image hides is s5ll driving my ar5s5c efforts.
The working process I developed is based on the ideas of the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. At the end of the 19th century, he proposed the revolutionary claim that the sta5c macro-objects that we observe in fact consist of continuously changing atomic micro-configurations. So, unobserved by us, within each object there is an ongoing dance of smaller parts that spontaneously re-combine. As long as these micro-configurations add up to the same macro-object, we do not even noice this dance. Boltzmann’s ideas of hidden micro-configurations inspired the process by which I investigate the image of the Haystack. I deconstruct the image into “smaller parts”, and then visibly re-assemble the parts in many different configurations, trying to surface the unseen poten5al of this one photo.
This process is my way to investigate our natural world. I am fascinated and obsessed by the intuitive process of re-combining the parts of the Haystack into endless combinations, discovering multiple “types / species” and many mutations within each type. It excites me to be part of this evolutionary process of transformation.
I also investigate my own and our collective visual memory. Many of the assemblies look like constructions and refer to monuments. Where do these seductive, monumental constructions come from? Why are some endearing, some sublime, some seductive?
Bewildered by the endless possibilities, the journey to unearth the hidden shapes and meanings of the Haystack has turned into an obsession. I have already accepted that my curiosity will never be fully satisfied. The remaining question is: have I been digging in the wrong places, is there something truly grandiose that I have not found yet? And the answer is probably yes.
Emile Gostelie started his artistic work late in life whilst graduating from the Photo Academy in Amsterdam (cum laude) in 2021, after a career in business.