The main material in almost all of my work has always been time. Time changes our understanding of everything. There is a famous quote from John Cage saying that “if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” I have always been fascinated by how objects around us that we consider inanimate actually move and transform, if you just wait long enough. It takes about 12 hours to complete a single drawing for Leaf. The work stretches our perceptual time, or the timeframe within which we can actually perceive change, to its limits. Progress takes place at a pace that leaves the visitor to choose between two approaches. Either leave now, let change happen while you are absent and compare the image preserved in your memory to the image found upon your return, or enter a meditative state that tries to discern change in the here and
now.
Most of my work takes place in two-dimensional screen space. In the case of Leaf (2021), it is even a really small amount of screen space. What makes Leaf (2021) different is that including this screen space into the encasing of the Herbarium box helps underline the questions the work evokes about what is and is not alive.
Text in the form of curatorial texts or artist statements can provide a door or an entry into a work. Text can add perspective or open up new ways of seeing. I don’t use text directly in my works though in several of my works - including in Leaf - its ideas originate from observations of how languages express ideas in a fundamentally different way. Some languages frame time, for instance, in terms of a line, others in terms of volumes. When we learn languages as a child, the words and ways of talking about the world we grow up in build physical centres and pathways in our brains. Later in life, these centres and paths shape how we see the world around us, including how each of us interprets a work like Leaf.
My work does not intend to evoke a specific reaction or response. All it does is create room in time and space that invites the audience to enter a territory outside one’s comfort zone. Our mind tends to take the path of least resistance, like a bolt of lightning trying to find the shortest route to the earth, causing the lightning to disappear the second it appears. Leaf extends perceptual time to the point where we have to question our understanding of what is and is not alive, what can and cannot be alive and ultimately, life and death.
There are multiple levels of research in contemporary art. Throughout history, artists have used practices like research to develop an approach to their work lasting many years. As a result, what we refer to as the "oeuvre" of great artists appears to us as a coherent whole. Curators, art historians, and collectors each have their own methods and approach to research, creating coherence between individual artists, their works and society at large. The cumulative body of all that work is what we know as the history of our culture. But research is not just about the past. It is also a way to make sense of the here and now, without which we will not be prepared to answer the questions we will face tomorrow. Much like language, research builds centres and pathways in our collective brains that guide how we see and interpret the world.
