………………..I reel off a small lovely revolution
………………..I am no longer of land
………………..
I am water again
………………..I carry foaming crests on my head
………………..I carry shooting shadows in my head
………………..on my back rests a mermaid
………………..on my back rests the wind
………………..
the wind and the mermaid sing
………………..
the foaming crests murmur
………………..the shooting shadows fall
………………..I reel off a small lovely rustling revolution
………………..
and I fall and I murmur and I sing
*
As artists duo work#art we realize location-specific installations. Ie: artworks tuned in an existing interior. Often in used or discarded materials, sometimes processed into practically useful designs.
But most of the time performed as an intervention in an environment or in a representation of matters of our concern.
A combination of this can be seen in our actions during ‘Road of Art’, an annually art route that takes place in the old centre of Kampen, ever since 2003. Meanwhile, it has become an attractive event for the Kamper community, but also for audiences from outside.
We joint almost all those years as a hostess / home-owner, artist duo or both. In our home at the quay or elsewhere in the city.
Gradually, the Road of Art has driven us out of our house. Meanwhile, Home Mary has become a house for the Arts.
With the showroom at ground floor, offices and guidance practice at the first, and at second floor an A.I.R. for artists of all disciplines.
We do not make art. As a duo we work together on the creation of art.
We both experience the process to this end. In here we see our mutual differences as causers of a huge potential. That potential-difference provides an opportunity for interplay of possibilities. Like a gulf in a landscape, it forms the course of a river, which cautiously grinds its own bedding. We lead what happens there like a pregnancy that develops between us both. To the birth of something we can not yet possibly apprehend.
The artwork takes her own shape and guides us gradually.
We investigate what unfolds before our eyes. We discover the way a work of art as an installation finds its own destination, between input and environment, to which we were constantly tuned on. And once ‘there’, it’s ‘ready’ for that moment. But never as an ‘everlasting varnish’.
Such an operation resembles sculpture: not in wood or stone, but in an energy field.
In our location-specific installations, the surround matter of the carved image remain intact. The intersection, formed between the image and ‘the stone’, creates a load in which image and interior as a guest and hostess take on a new guise. At that intersection between areas and interventions, a play ground develops and give rise to a certain tension. In this atmosphere the audience feels invited to fulfill its own role: relate to what appears before them and what enables them to distill from it. A surround playground on the spot that turns on into reflection and exchange to what is found out and touches.
In between what it does to you, how it keeps you busy and what you do with it at the time. That’s how everyone actually joins in the artwork.
Usually it happens involuntary and unconditionally, but at the same time an awareness of itself and togetherness is developing.
In fact, each installation is a temporary completion, a phase in the development of dealing with our own lives that we like to see as a work of art.
Never complete or perfect, but vital as life itself. With the Kamper community as ‘Das soziales Plastik’, like Joseph Buys once called it.
A poetic cohesion of artwork and surroundings, like clay formed on the potter’s wheel. A wary skin that caresses the senses and experiences people’s own pulse.
It finds its way, where and while irony, oppression and joy struggle for priority.
We like to work in real contact. Our website is just a representation of our contributions, not only to this annual event. A bundle of actions of our concern in the actual momentum.
Now captured in bits with a bite, hoping one can discover some of the character in our work.
Road of Art inspired us to vital continuation: a life that we, as workheart Foundation, increasingly realize internationally. Starting in Europe, next in Vietnam and soon in South Africa. Life as a work of art in which the globe as a playground.
workheart Foundation: Rietje van t Veen
work#art: Douwe Buwalda & Bert van de Sluijs
From: de getekende naam (‘the branded name’) 1952 translation Diane Butterman URL
