What next? picture tomorrow
38cc, Delft 2016
I view landscapes as a cultural metaphor which provides a context for my work. By extracting textures and compositional structures from urban agglomerations and reinterpreting them graphically, a growing series of imaginary city landscapes emerges.
The underlying face of a city can be uncanny, sinister or even menacing. This thought formed the starting point for a series of drawings where contrasts, conversions and specific attributes of existing cities are used as both foundation and fodder. In Istanbul, the city thrives while facing the permanent threat of earthquakes and the annihilation of large parts of the population. In Tashkent, Uzbekistan a communist-era telecommunication tower looms, while just a few streets away, handmade clay bricks dry in the sun. On the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean Sea, a volcano covers the hastily abandoned capital with a layer of lava. Above lies a strange uninhabited landscape, pocked with the uppermost parts of the ruined city, forming an entrance to a buried underworld of collapsed edifices.
Several of my drawings refer to Tokyo, and explore the contrast between the modest workshops and objects of craftsmen and the huge metropolis in which they live and work. At each workshop visited during a residency at the Tokyo Wondersite—a tortoiseshell craftsman, a wood craftsman, a window screen maker, a brush maker, a tabi maker, a chopstick maker and a textile dyeing workshop, to name a few—sketches record the working process and physical attributes of the environment, such as the texture of the materials and the forms of the tools. This sketch material is applied over city structures in the attempt to uncover the polarities of the metropolis.
In 2013, a large-scale drawing was commissioned by UHI Bohemia and is based on features drawn from the city of Prague. Fragments of stories lay under a rugged landscape of tiled roofs; the canopy of the city provides shelter for an infinite collection of tales based on existing legends and observation of the city’s microcosm of characters. Like a palimpsest, where an original drawing has been erased and overwritten, one figure is layered over the next. This becomes a dense texture; the historic sediment of Prague, piled layer by layer in its buildings and monuments.
The city of Zoetermeer is the subject of another commission. A historic site of peat excavation in the Netherlands during the 16th and 17th centuries, the drawing imagines the formerly excavated volumes of earth placed back in the contemporary suburban landscape of barn houses, farms and windmills.
In each drawing, I follow a consistent methodology. Beginning with a research period, I dig into the written and visual history of a subject and, if possible, expand upon this research in person in the field. This information forms a foundation which, through sketching, evolves into conceptual and formal development.
By delving into the physical and cultural fabric of cities around the globe, I am building a repertoire of textures, objects and emblems that I incorporate into my drawings of imaginary landscapes.
