A head in a crash helmet on an undefined lump of matter. It took a while for this image to sink in. Again, life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. The image seems to be a summary of the position of man on earth: becoming conscious in space on a lump of matter. Is it a slow awakening or will it remain a dream?

Omkijken, Ik kijk om. Omkijken vind ik een mooi thema voor een beeld. Misschien is het een beetje bijbels. Het toont betrokkenheid bij dat wat ons omringt. Ook als je er vanaf de achterkant naar kijkt brengt het perspectief. Er ontstaat diepte en alles krijgt een eigen plek in het universum. Misschien wordt zichtbaar wat je tot nu toe ontging. Dat is ook waar mijn werk over gaat, oog hebben voor de wereld eromheen. Pas als je iets echt leert zien kun je het bestuderen.

Zo verhoudt kunst zich ten opzichte van kennis en inzicht in alles dat met de mens samenhangt.

If you see this sculpture, you are not drawn towards it instantly. The wronged posture, a mix of sadness, anger and being side-lined. It seems to me to be the expression of the populist voter today. When he sees this image, it makes him furious, and he thinks artists are guzzlers for grants. While it is a good portrait, shows exactly what it is. Trapped in grief and therefore closed from inspiration. Look at it and feel what your reaction is.

The sadness this image shows is a sadness that we turn away from all too quickly, it touches us. After my father passed away, I recognized them and saw them in every city. Women who were visible alone, being at home was not an option, but a cup of coffee in the city also frightens them. When your loved one dies, everything seems to change, and your own life perspective has become a thing. If you don’t moan about your loss, then you will do about your own fate.

Photography is an important medium for me. The images I make could not have been created without the existence of photography. The flash that freezes everything for a moment, the moving image, the images overlaid, all applicable in the modern visual language. 

In my work, that flash also represents meaningful moments that we remember in a hurricane of different impressions. Simplifications because the flash came too early or too late for the exact story. 

Sometimes this seems like a monument for analogue photography. Studying by observation to understand the world. This approach does not seem to fit in with the acceleration of the digital world.

A head in a crash helmet on an undefined lump of matter. It took a while for this image to sink in. Again, life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. The image seems to be a summary of the position of man on earth: becoming conscious in space on a lump of matter. Is it a slow awakening or will it remain a dream?

Looking back, I look back. I find looking back is a nice theme for an image. Maybe it’s a bit biblical. It shows commitment to what surrounds us. Even if you look at it from the back, it brings perspective. Depth is created and everything gets its own place in the universe. Perhaps what has escaped your eye so far will become visible. That is also what my work is about, having an eye for the world around the sculpture. Only when you really learn to see something can you study it. 

In this way art relates to knowledge and insight into everything that is related with humanity.

Gagged and blinded, the body switches to the other senses. Deprived of your human dignity, you go to survival mode. The remaining senses try to compensate for what the eyes no longer see, stress makes you like a trapped wild animal.

The similarity with Lady Justice is striking and distressing. She is also blindfolded but does not play any role in this dominance game, at most afterwards.

I made five of these sculptures and together there is a group dynamic. The way people always react to each other’s presence. But sometimes time ceases to be linear, and you see five movie stills from one person’s movie. But as soon as you notice that it is already passed. This keeps me interested, time is what you style if you want to show the human being in motion.

With this sculpture group I wanted to show the dominant behaviour of leaders who shake hands at a summit meeting. Basically a ‘gaze down’, monkey behaviour, because only one can be the leader… 

As often happens during the process, my starting point changed when I separated the two images from each other. I saw that no matter how I put them down, they just kept communicating with each other and with no one else. Their own bubble that is maintained even at a great distance. Beautiful this human interaction, did you know what that looks like?

Directly beneath the surface lies fear, ready to go off. Flee, fight, or freeze is a chemical reaction in your body that instantly transforms you in another corner of your personality. There is so much more under the same surface, but only primatologists seem to have an eye for it. 

I make a lot of this visible and that’s the way you can study it. As art can serve science. I am about  the poetry, but it remains remarkable: if you show the vulnerable site of the human being, people turn away their eyes. On television and in books, theatre and the news, people can be viewed more safely, because it is from a distance.