February 4, 2012

Sometimes making something leads to nothing

An 'intervention' by Emmy Dijkstra

Today my colleague and friend Emmy Dijkstra comes to visit me in Breda. Beginning of 2011 we started a online residence (see www.edijkstra.wordpress.com, it's in Dutch with a lot of pictures!), first with VAR (Virtual Art Residence, I also had a residence their in the virtual Van Gogh caravan). It went very well, so we continued making work together with the same theme, without actually working together. It suprising how we somehow end up with works that really fit together.

This weekend we wanted to try out making our "ceremonial Papua house ceiling". Breda is covered in snow, it looks beautiful, but I don't know if we're able to put the roof up. We will see.
In April we are going to display our collaborated work in de forest in Enschede. We both big fans of Ephemeral art and looking for a place to exhibited our work, it didn't feel right to put our work in a space with white, clean walls. I was reading the novel "The Summer Book" by Tove Jansson last Summer and I suddenly knew where we should exhibit our work. Emmy also read it and concluded the same: An exhibition in the forest.

When I met Emmy Dijkstra, I already knew her from the Art Academy, but didn't really know her, see made this really fine, small graphic work, full of people wearing tribal or traditional clothing. She had a residence in France and came back with paper dresses inspired by Tapa (I wrote a blogpost in Dutch about her work and Tapa in 2009, see "Synchroniciteit deel II Tapa"). We talked about working together, but it didn't happend until she moved to Enschede. In the Summer of 2010 our work was hanging next to each other during the exhibition "Paper in Progress" and it really fit together, our collaboration started then and there.

Next to Emmy's small graphical works, she started to make more (temporary) paper installations. Her new surrounding have a very strong and positive influence on her work. Enschede is much greener and she lives really nearby a forrest now. I really like the works where she leaves a drawing somewhere, she calls them "interventions'. She made a project for schoolchildren making with them these "interventions". It really great that she gets children to make contemporary, conceptual, Ephemeral art and that they really enjoying doing so!

The title for this post is the title of a work by Francis Alÿs, I will make a post about his work soon. Emmy Dijkstra admires this artist, and so do I. He inspired her to let her work go, be free and let yourself be suprized by the outcome. I'm really fortuned to have the possibility of working together with Emmy Dijkstra. She gives me a lot of inspiration and also it is great to have found an artist that makes things with the same theme, temporality, and feeling.

Paper dress by Emmy Dijkstra

"Here I fell asleep" by Emmy Dijkstra

Emmy's work at an exhibition

"I found a corn plant and made leaves for it" by Emmy Dijkstra

More about Emmy Dijkstra on www.emmydijkstra.nl

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