Looking Back

If I trace back to the origins of the works I'm currently making it is clear that there are different roots that got intertwined over time. I think that the first one lies in China, back in 2019. There I came into contact with ink. With the tradition of Chinese landscape painting where rock and water play a very important role. Rock, the static element, imposes its form, in the short term, upon water, the fluid element. But when allowing time to play its part water will, in the long term, impose its form upon rock. Yin and Yang.

In 2020, while I was at my parents home when the corona pandemic was in full swing, I encountered some beautiful videos on African pottery making. Because my mother was complaining a lot at that time about the clay in the garden impairing her ability to maintain and nurture the vegetable garden I wanted to see if I could refine this clay into a material that allowed me to throw some pots. I dug a big hole in the back of the garden and, while dissolving the earth in big buckets of water to separate the clay from the silt and the sand I started working on a clay oven to bake the final products in. In the end I ended up with a semi-workable material but I never got around to baking it since building the clay oven was a bit more than I could chew, especially when the weather turned bad for a couple of weeks, impairing my ability to work on it. I ultimately threw in the towel on the whole project but the beauty of the process of making pots as well as the finished containers themselves continue to inspire me.

Later, in 2021, I hiked through a landscape of rock and water in Scotland. Water was abundant, especially since the weather was so bad. It welled up everywhere and gushed past our feet, following the path of least resistance through the rocks. Back home I started painting rocks and river sources. At the same time, the pottery stayed on my mind and I made some works of imaginary pottery: vases, cups, plates, amphorae etc. in parallel to the river and rock works. In the end most of these did not stand the test of time: they were too alien in comparison with the other work I was making at the time and I painted over them.

An aerial image of the Aleutians, an island chain connecting Alaska to the Kamchatka peninsula struck me. Volcanos jutting up straight from the sea. A source, not of water but of rock! Rivers of fire. A livestream of a developing volcano in Iceland. Suddenly I started on a series of paintings of volcanos, often in the sea with ships steaming past with chimneys smoking as human-made volcanos. Suddenly I made the connection with pottery again through the flemish word for it: aardewerk: "work from earth" and not to forget the Italian Terra-Cotta: "baked earth". Suddenly the pottery appeared again alongside the volcanos and the ships. It occurred to me that there is an English word that ties all these entities together: Vessel. Something that contains, that holds within itself something else or, if empty, can be filled.

The practice of Kintsugi: repairing broken pottery with golden inlays and thus highlighting the shards and the imperfection of the object also forms the foundation of a philosophy for living that enables me to looks towards the future with open eyes. We will be or are already facing tremendous challenges that we seem unable to grasp, let alone resolve. Our societal machinery, developed in an age already obsolete, is unable to make the sharp turns necessary to navigate these turbulent waters. On the contrary, its enormous mass seems to drag us unstoppably over the edge. It is hard for me to not become cynical when confronted with this reality. I don't want to put my head in the sand and live like nothing is going on. I want to face the future! But how to do so if this future seems to be in free fall with a very hard ground as its destination? In a way I think the concept of Kintsugi can help me. It cultivates a certain mentality around things that are broken. How to deal with this broken 'earth-enware'?

For some reason this perspective gives me solace. It goes beyond the stress of the object in free-fall that you desperately try to catch the mind's eye image of it shattering on the floor to the moment of finality: it happened, the pieces are lying there and there is nothing you can do to undo this tragedy. It is how you act next that matters.