Jeanine Vloemans

Psalm 84:6 speaks of a valley of Baca, a Hebrew word that has long been translated as ‘weeping’ – hence the Vale of Tears, which in Christian imagery represents an earthly life beset by trials and sorrows. This explains to some extent the work in progress Jeanine Vloemans expanded at EKWC, or at least its title: Vale of Tears. The up-right sculptures of different sizes, executed in shades of blue and aquamarine, appear like giant teardrops arrested in their fall on the very moment they touch the floor. This defiance of gravity lends the work a certain lightness, it allows the tears to transform and become trees in a Tuscan landscape for instance. Vloemans also made several smaller tableaus with themes connected to landscape and nature. One in particular stands out, a murder of crows moving in all directions while spaces between their flapping wings form penetrating, all-seeing eyes. Vloemans arrived to EKWC with the start of an archive — a series of test tiles tinted with pigments and oxides in a spectrum of percentages and firing temperatures. With EKWC’s clay bodies and pigment library, Vloemans then continued this work and, in the process, found the palette for her sculptures. The teardrop-shaped works she produced ranged in size — from something one could hold in one’s hand to some approximately one meter high — and they were made, first, inside hand-built formers (which were designed to also support the works during firing) and then finished using the coiling technique. Because her ambition was to have the finished, floor-sitting sculptures be able to rock back and forth without falling, considerable testing was put in to determining the right weight and scale ratios for the works and in finding the most appropriate materials to further weigh-down the sculptures from within.