About my workNederlands

"Every form has an inner force" (Fritz Wotruba)

Every form has an inner force, a life force that wants to actualize itself. It is with this intention that I give a sculpture its form and reason for being. Light and movement are essential elements in this. For me, sculpting in stone is about playing with light and dark. Movement becomes visible through the traces of the chisel, the sculptor’s handwriting.

Light of DayNederlands

Light of day, the fullness of daylight. With all its energy, strength and brightness. Fully open to vision. This for me is a metaphor for vitality and zest for life. I worked on this sculpture with this thought constantly in mind. It had to have a contained tension which would be visible or otherwise perceptible to the viewer. Working on the tension of the convex forms was enormously challenging. At precisely which point and time will this force manifest itself. It is a process of looking, stepping back, and deciding either to leave the form as it is or to “peel off” yet another layer. During the process, I decided to give more emphasis to the effect of light and dark, making the form more dramatic, but also clearer. Strength and vitality expressed in stone. Light of day..

Ideas and conceptsNederlands

Seeds are the beginning and end of the lifecycle of plants and flowers. A seed is sometimes referred to as a time capsule of life. Travelling through space, displaced by the wind, they even travel through time. Some are thousands of years old. However difficult it can be to imagine that a whole plant could grow and blossom out of a tiny seed in your hand, this seed is the beginning of life, growth, a new form.
Seeds vary enormously both in shape and size. For instance, the Coco de Mer seed weighs around 20 kilos, while a single gram of seed powder from the orchid family can contain some two million seeds.
In my studio, I had been collecting, examining and drawing all sorts of seeds and seedpods for quite some time. At a certain point, one shape in particular nestled in my head. I translated my thoughts into a clay model and large charcoal drawings of 70 x 50 cm. The shape was more than capable of assuming monumental proportions. The next step was a scale model in stone.

The working processNederlands

From a rough block of a stone (Euville), I started by making a large cylinder of 90 cm in diameter and 70 cm in height. I then divided the lower part into eight parts, from which I sculpted eight convex forms. Having finished that, I sawed in lines towards the top of the stone. The stone was then rotated using a forklift truck, after which I again had to determine the centre of the sculpture and drill a whole into it. I thus proceeded to sculpt the eight parts out of the cylinder, one by one.