TEXTS

Quatre Mains / Zonder Handen , 4 SOLO’s at Emergent, Veurne

On July 20th I drove back to the old house.  In the corner of a back-room I found a little box, neatly tucked away under a stack of office supplies. Inside were 36 Polaroids he had taken between 1996 and 2001 as an engineer on a construction site.  Looking through the images, I realised I had inherited his way of looking at things. I drove home on the 23rd, after the burial. I unboxed the photos and stared at them for quite a while. A few days later, I made my first picture. "

The discovery of the 36 polaroids, as described in her own words by Stephanie Lamoline, marked the beginning of her autonomous artistic activity.

The discovery of her father's pictures was the trigger for a visual dialogue given form by Lamoline and starting from objects she found in her father's house after his death. Instead of looking for objects that might be financially valuable, she gathered specifically those objects that appeared to have no monetary value. Everyday, banal objects that raise the question why they were preserved with so much care. We are confronted here with a  recognizable form of reasoning : "this just might be useful one day" ...

This intuition was proved right since Lamoline's father left behind a plethora of objects as source material for the artist. They are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with unending possibilities of variation. Each piece can be combined with another one. The result will never be complete though, there is no definitive version of this puzzle.

Lamoline reacts via photographic images to the objects she found and she uses them as well in a way that's completely her own. Something initiated as the conversion of a life changing event becomes something new and universal. The small individual story becomes something vast without end.

Through her practice the artist is looking constantly for traces and connections. She also invites the viewer to do the same. She put the images of this exhibition accurately next to and opposite each other.
She doesn't want to lead the spectator's view but she appears to create a course, a trail which is never to be taken literally and may not come to a conclusion. There is the glass plate of the stereo set, there are gloves, electric wires, a mirror, stones ... objects that can be seen in several places of the show. The viewer is taken by the hand but also left free. These objects were his, they became hers, and bit by bit they are ours.

Lamoline succeeds in showing the reality and materiality of the objects in a sober and unsentimental way. This impression is created because at first sight the images seem sterile and digitally manipulated. This is not the case here : nothing has been manipulated, only directed by the artist. We only see reality without photoshop or filters. To counter sterility small imperfections have remained visible so as to provide a light- footed, humorous note. Lucky coincidences, such as the withered rubber soles of a pair of working boots, provide a tragi-comical balance. In “Subtle Recollections of a Joyful Delight, pt. 1” we can see a sock balancing on a pile of stones while the footprints of the artist are still visible at the bottom of the scene. "The artist was here too", seems to be the humoristic message.

Behind every image there is a personal story, sometimes with a playful intent. To reveal all these stories would compromise what is going on here. The images have become contemporary still-lives (nature mortes).
The artist presents the objects like a taxidermist would. She conserves things with a look at the future. In the room on the ground floor we are invited to witness this evolution. A few objects are shown here on a table with a white tiled, sterile surface. They appear to be a random choice but they are fundamentally important in the principle of the dialogue. They are points of
departure but they also return as dynamic participants in the dialogue, after the photographic process has taken place.

Via the recurring play of connections and found objects the artist makes use of basic principles such as watching and showing. In an intimate corner she placed, “Subtle Recollections of a Joyful Delight, pt. 3”.
This work shows a plaster cast of her own nose, carefully displayed against a glass plate. The scene is put on a mirror, showing the reflection on the whole. The marble tablet which functions as a base also plays its part in the photographic process.

This photographic course was bundled in the book "Quatre mains / Zonder Handen”  which is also a part of the show. It can be read as a testimonial, simultaneously from left to right and from right to left.
On the left we see the original polaroids, on the right Lamoline's images. The book becomes an object which participates in the dialogue. Its title refers to the ensemble play in a piano piece but also to the moment when a child frees her or his hands : "Look, I can do it without hands (hands free) !"
The images are accompanied by a sort of legend with electrical signs.
In this way the story is also codified and rendered almost unreadable. The artist describes this as "the impossible basic premise of the book:  “to sustain a dialogue with a deceased person”. This impossibility might still contain infinity.
What was, becomes again, becomes something else. Hands free.

Hilde Borgermans (February 2022)