Guido van der Linden
For Guido van der Linden, teacher and coach at the School for Young Talent in The Hague, an EKWC residency was a return to his artistic practice and to his favourite theme of hidden or implicit presence. First, he press-moulded several large (1 meter diameter) ceramic dishes, designed to transmit the delicate sound of a heartbeat across a thirty-meter distance. Keeping them in one piece posed considerable technical problems, which only made him enjoy it more. He proceeded with a set of tiles modelled on the pavers in the street leading to his grandfather’s home. Only when these demanding works were finished, he found the space to play and experiment, throwing slabs of clay against trees in the Oisterwijk forest for instance. The results capture an absence, an empty space to indicate that something once was there.
Jan Bokma
One glance at the highly polished sculptures Jan Bokma made before he came to EKWC betrays their perfection, the tireless refinement and time-consuming attention for detail. The contrast to the spontaneous, intuitive works he made in Oisterwijk could hardly be bigger. They deal with the same grand themes of life and death and procreation, just a bit messier, more organic, inspired by mushrooms and fungi that grow on decaying wood amidst the living trees. Bokma is delighted with the new impulses clay gave to his artistic process. The sculptures are a direct expression of the connection he feels with all kinds of life forms that thrive and propagate and feed on each other with a force that is at once macabre and inexplicably erotic.
Wessel Verrijt
Dutch Artist Wessel Verrijt likes to work with used, discarded objects and materials, because they carry the traces of time, of handling and utilisation; they already contain their own stories. So how to approach clay, this apparently undefined, a-historic mass that you have to shape in some way? After an initial struggle, Verrijt befriended the clay. He organically built several large containers and relied on the firing process to transform them into a new material he would ‘find’ when the kiln door opened. The resulting shells – or perhaps pieces of armour – became part of the large ceremonial figures he made for the H3H biennial in Oosterhout, where they welcomed the visitors with their somewhat eery and yet not altogether unfriendly presence.
Laurent Malherbe |2
Dutch sculptor Laurent Malherbe is a bit of an über-handyman: he effortlessly blends life and art in installations that redefine the concept of constructed realities. During his latest EKWC residency, however, Malherbe decided to scale down his buildings-in-progress to the size of a model-train decor. In the process he focussed on essentials, a bare minimum of floors and walls, a suggestion of interrupted activities as if the workers are out on their lunch break. In other works, Malherbe stays close to reality, making a plaster mould of his worn-down safety shoe and casting it in ceramics like a Van Gogh painting come to life and miraculously multiplied. Another work, a fragment of a decorative frame is executed in white chocolate – a humorous reference to Hansel and Gretel or, since this is Malherbe, a clear-cut case of home sweet home.
Suzie van Staaveren
When Suzie van Staaveren was commissioned to create two sculptures for a restricted area of the Den Bosch Palace of Justice, she was faced with a challenge. One of the conditions of the assignment was that the work should not evoke strong emotions. Van Staaveren solved this by focussing on formal elements of the architecture, in line with the vision of architect Charles Vandenhove who made art an integral part of the building. The resulting sculptures mirror the characteristic columns from the monumental public staircase. One is a partial replica in felt, hanging upside down from the ceiling; the other consists of a series of suspended ceramic rings – made at EKWC – that represent the columns’ various measures. Partly extruded, partly press-moulded, the rings were glazed in different shades of blue to allow a subtle play of nearness and distance.
