After I had seen the mourning figures in the Völkerslacht Denkmal in Leipzig, this work was created. The war comes back in my images from time to time. But because of the way in which I design female portraits, this is less common with these sculptures.  This image reminds me of Munch’s Skrik (The Scream) but this scare is different. I see the madness of existential violence that goes with war. The mind spins around like a runaway slot machine, looking for something to hold on to.

My ‘stamp style’ is a brutal way of working. Each stamp must be pressed into the clay with appropriate force, but this also deforms the previous impressions. After which the position must be corrected according to what the theatrical moment calls for. The meaning of the image moves with it and so a beautiful theatre passes me by. Sometimes you skim past images that you would really like to have but ultimately can’t get, like this series. And vice versa, you don’t know what you were looking for and it is already in front of you. As Karel Appel once said: “you just have to ‘watch it finishing”. Yes.

To need something to become yourself or to want to add to something. Everybody has his own way of giving meaning to one’s life. My relation to this subject is double, I don’t dare to show myself as a weak person or depending on something. I can be jealous of people that do dare and at the same time pleased that I don’t need to do it. It makes me vulnerable.

What does the male want from the female? That’s what I ask myself by the first sculpture I made with a women-stamp incorporated. The visual language that I use while making a male portrait was not one on one applicable. With a woman a scar is decay and disease while by a man it stands for toughness and strength. It shows how sex specific you look. Therefore, this first step, in which I try to find out what the “male gaze” means. While at the same time learn to look past it and make the feminine visible.

I have saved many newspaper photos of a person who is busy with something in his life. The subject of ‘ecstasy’ has often come up in my life, but not yet like this. Agitation keeps people busy, why actually? Does it belong to the “tools” of reproduction? And does that also make us susceptible to drugs, for example? Releasing yourself to communicate with the gods. Does this give meaning to life? These are some of those subjects that concern me when I go through the clippings in my studio and observe humanity.

Every day we are weighed down by gravity, but sometimes you seem to be able to escape it, like here, in this image. I don’t know how that is, it is a recognition of a carefree moment. You are not in the straitjacket of your own story or a compelling environment. You will surface as  new and can breathe freely again. The road is at your feet. Good to know when gravity comes along again.

To flee is one of the responses to fear and the vulnerable people often use that route. For photos and film, you flee into invisibility by placing your hand between you and the lens. You see this  in the media when a story is being told and the hunted wants to withdraw from it, for whatever reason. These are uncomfortable moments in which the camera becomes a hunter and the escapee the goat.

There is a magic in this image that I love. It is a nice portrait, but it is not sweet. I see an autonomous movement, the image seems to be reinventing itself with a superhuman force. A force that few people use, no matter how troubled they are by their non-change.

The succession of generations demands a lot. To me it looks like making a copy of yourself, but without the mistakes. A 2.0. updated ready for another round. You live on yourself, but you also start again at the origin. The everlasting game of ‘who am I’, while your eyes are kept closed. Drowning in yourself. The urge to live on yourself or to do that by creating offspring.

Making this image was tough, I couldn’t bring out what I saw in the image. But when I gave up, a new meaning within the image came to present itself as if to say that I should not despair. That’s the way it is with the women in my life… Maybe that’s why it was a necessary process for me when I wanted to make a series of female portraits. 

Various people are of the opinion that a portrait of a woman is always only sweet. There is a lot to be said for this, especially if you look at the history of sculpture. That is precisely why I radically deny that and approach women openly. And see that behind the feeling of failure lies a new meaning.