The multiplicity of Van Breda’s work entails a study of the spatial narratives within the process of image making. Current research topics involve nature and landscape in the Anthropocene and the spatial qualities of the textile medium. Like an ethnographer he questions our environment, with a concern for the social and political conditions of places. Through historical research, site-specific works and material studies, physical places are transformed into ‘environments’, where new spatial narratives can deploy like a ‘speculative fabulation’.
The use of fabulation as a way of fabrication brings him to the point of embodying ‘other’ and in doing so question the cultural significance of representation and its role in defining our belonging to the world. Through different media the artist seeks to manipulate spaces and invites us to reimagine our surrounding, with the clear intention to blur the sharpness of existing meanings and interpretations, in doing so free our mind to reach and invent new dimensions within the same physical appearance.
The fascination for how we experience and engage with spaces becomes tangible in Van Breda’s textile works. Tapestries bend and fold in multiple ways, covering and uncovering abstract images that suggest an impressionistic experience. Constructed by hand, directly working onto the canvas, the artist creates an intimate play of thread and colour, distinguishing Van Breda’s work from the common jaquard woven works and entangling the viewer far beyond the textile surface.