Konijnenhol / Dikke Vrienden

"Konijnenhol / Dikke Vrienden" builds on the project "Quatre Mains / Zonder Handen" that arose from the emptiness left by the death of my father. That desolation generated a new omnipresence in the form of a lilac styrofoam stone.

When it came to exhibiting my previous project, the book Quatre Mains / Zonder Handen, I felt it wasn’t enough to simply hang the photographs on the wall in the conventional manner. I wanted to translate the book into three dimensions, so that it would really inhabit the space. This shift from a two-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional reality was the starting point for the present project.

I blew up one of the objects that appeared in the book -a small piece of pyrite- and started a photographic study of this now very large styrofoam stone. This in turn became a study on the reproduction of images and the serendipitous possibilities that arise out of this process.

By experimenting with perception, by questioning the visual language of photography – re-using, re-photographing, copying – and shifting the context of my subject, I sought to increase the materiality of the image and evoke the idea of spatiality.

I am very much fascinated by border zones: places where two or more things meet. By recreating some of the small objects that appear in my images and by scaling them up to the size of the actual space, I want to explore the line between sculpture and photography.

As I work fast and intuitively, the notion of time and control are prominentely apparent. Is it possible to use photography to capture the essence of this flow? Can a transformative process of image-making be as important as the resulting image?