La Semaine
Integrative Seminar and Studio 2
For my curiosity Journal, I wanted to create a format that is very personal to me, similar to the passages I wrote and the photographs I choose. When I personally think about a journal or diary of some sort I don’t really think about one book. When I write passages about my emotions or elements that influence me I usually write it on postcards and send it to my friends and family to signify how I am getting these things off my chest. Within this I have a very traditional approach towards writing, it being produced by hand and shipped by hand so I wanted to create a book that signifies this hand-made aspect of my personality.
As my writings usually reflected the overflow of objects and beings into each other, I wanted to allow to enable the audience a glimpse of my perception of the world, with all its colors and shapes. When it came to materials I wanted to choose something that would express my obsession with haptic elements. My choice of oil colours furthermore also depicts my connection to the old masters, as it can be observed in my “Musee D’Orsay”-writing.
instead of using Monday to Sunday as the titles of my various writings and sketches, I choose to use French translations of the day before, “pre-yesterday”, yesterday, today, tomorrow, “after-tomorrow” and the day after. This establishes a relationship with the audience and the present, future and past. I shows that even though these pieces of writing are contemporary bits of thought they align themselves to a bigger picture, “aujourd’hui” which should be closely recognised and observed.
The paintings of the photographs are very clear, connected to line drawings and easy to understand. I established the paintings when I was observing the abstraction images and objects depicted themselves in my head. As I wrote it often, elements overflow into each other yet this is more difficult to observe if so on photographs. That is why I wanted to enable the audience a glimpse of my perception, of my relationship to color and form but also invite to discussion of their own perception of such.
Though the book is of big size, there are almost double the pages of the week. This is because of the continuity of emotions and thoughts, to show that even though a glimpse is shown, it is a minimal piece in the spectrum of our existence as human beings. It does not just enable me to continue the book but also invite other artist and the audience to continue it themselves. This is inspired by a game surrealists used to play where they drew bits of the picture and let the person next to them draw their own without them having seen the former. It establishes the phenomenon of human interaction and existence and illustrates the artist-audience relationship.
