Klaaifrou

Ever since the second year of my previous art education I have found myself being intrigued by the question of ‘movement’ that lies within sculptural work. There are many ways of implying a sense of movement, but this never satisfied my questioning. There had never been an intention of animating the inanimate, rather, I wanted to discover what actual movement would entail: what it does, what it means, what it can offer.

Funnily enough, I classify most of my sculptures as ‘Disintegration Sculptures’. This is because, as seen within this video above, they simply disintegrate back into a formless puddles of whichever materials they’re are made of. However, as much as I enjoy this term, it often leaves a negative taste. What I really aim to do is capture the process of its creation itself, and depending on who you ask, none of the creation is meant to be negative. Quite the opposite instead.

To claim “having a bond with the material” is probably already a cliché with lots of cultural baggage. Yet, I find myself saying it nonetheless. Whenever I use my hands, feel the material, watch it develop, and express itself in countless ways. Truly, the “itself” becomes ourselves. As we find us drifting back through different worlds. That’s why I was never interested in making sculptural portraits of people, except perhaps when in jest. The human figure becomes already interesting enough when it exists only through its meat and bones.

Then, during a warm summer in 2023, I sat in my room and discovered the answer.

A clay depiction of a woman had been standing on the shelf for a long time. I liked it, I hated it, I wanted it gone, I wanted to see it as it had been before. There was something about its presence that bothered me. It was there, finished, and yet I could never quite settle with it as such. But when I found a way of letting it disintegrate, I realised that it had become equally alive again. Her lifeless expression, which had observed me for weeks, came back, as if blinking for the first time again. Her stare was so intense that it felt as though another presence was nearby. We had an unspoken dialogue. No words had ever been uttered, yet we understood.

It was the movement that I had been searching for. I never saw a woman disintegrate, it had only been clay, and formed an expression that made me ponder my own existence. Movement is space, space is freedom, freedom is moving in space. I hated everything, most of you actually, simply because I loved what life had been. But then, I had found myself in stale time. In notions of time standing still. Of primes and measurements. Of fighting to maintain something that’s already losing. Whatever I had been, never again.

The end of History has been proclaimed once. And so the horrors can continue as if only in the past.

Never again. I wanted to experience the movement, because I never hated all of you, I just hated what life always had been. As I watched the clay figure break down, her expression faded into obscurity, it was as if I had seen a stranger on public transport: a shared life unknown, an imagined meeting that never happened.

I was left with nothing but a puddle of wet clay in a jar, yet I had found my catharsis as a “sculptor”.