Double Landscape, 2018
Series of large drawings and engraved paper pulp
For my solo exhibition Façade at P/////AKT in Amsterdam, I realised two series that both explore a different aspect of the idea of skin. The series Double Landscape is about the paper skin: the atlas and the map. This is brought into relation with a story of an iguana that loses its skin at several moments in its life and thus can show different versions of itself. I relate the skin in the series Façade to architectural elements, especially the material of glass. Here the skin is part of two sides – inside and outside –, which makes it seem to disappear. The two series were presented on a floating structure. When you walk past them as a spectator, the works move, almost imperceptibly. Like a literal façade, the construction divides the space into two. On one side you could see Double Landscape, on the other side Façade. In this way, the front and back of the works could both be seen, which challenges their traditional hierarchy, and references the skin as a membrane and mediator between two worlds.
Maria Barnas was invited by P/////AKT to write a text in response to the exhibition Façade. Read it here. See also the article in Metropolis M written by Lotte van Geijn.
The Place Between My Pencil and the Paper is a series of large drawings of old navigation techniques such as the ‘stick chart’. Stick charts were made by the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands. The diagrams represent, among other things, wave patterns and islands. The navigation techniques are drawn on coloured sheets of paper cut into the white paper. By doing so the colour can be seen at the front but also at the back of the work. The forms are based on maps I found in an old Dutch school atlas with the provocative title Ons Eigen Land [Our Own Country]. The back of these works is equally important as the front. The coloured planes form an abstracted image that emphasises the topic of the work: the medium of the map and the navigation techniques form a thin membrane over the landscape that provides as much insight as it takes away. The title refers to the blind spot that occurs when the tip of the pencil touches the paper and that particular spot on the paper is no longer visible to the draftsman. Just as the drawings of the navigation tools obscure the maps and create blind spots.