1. When we see things change, we also observe a constant process of annihilation. Events, things and ideas come and go, pass by as if they were never there. We are participants in this process that is taking place in and around us. My sculptures, however, seem to belong to another world, subject to other laws of existence. When making these sculptures I asked myself how my work relates to change, a phenomenon that is so present and essential to modern life.
2. When I started my life as an artist in 1980, I wrote down this sentence: ³Here in front of you is an organism with which the owner totally identifies.² In these words I linked the physical, material world to the conceptual world. It did mean that I wanted to make sculptures. My sculptures slow down, uphold and ultimately abolish the passing of time to open up a world of stillness. Yet here, within a motionless world of sculpture, a specific transition takes place as well.
3. When I speak about transition in my work I mean transition from an event to a memory of an event, which can ultimately lead to an image of it. In this process of abstraction and concretization, changes are taking place in which a living moment is transformed into a death moment. The sculpture is the place for such a transformation. I call it metamorphosis, a new form of existence that arises out of memory. Memories certainly have a life, but no form, and they are made real, feasible but remain motionless. I see my sculptures as a place where life and death coincide, become linked, dance together. It is a sad place because it reminds us that nothing is permanent. It is a happy place because it reminds us that while things do disappear they will be preserved by the intermediation of memory. My works are like squares in a city at night: a place for rituals. You will find my moments of stillness captured here.
4. Why, when speaking about memory, does one think about death? In the memory there is no future, here death is alive, isn¹t it? It is also where the artist is alive and feels at home. The memory is the instrument for getting closer to death without leaving the world of the living. I name my sculptures ³immortals², the result of a going from a living moment to a still-point. In my text about immortality I wanted to formulate the intertwining of life and death, change and stillness.
5. I made a series of nine sculptures. Initially there were ten. I wanted them to stand in pairs. Juxtaposed, the attention they attract hovers from one to the other, as if something is handed over and given back again, and so on. It is not clear what it is they have in common, or how they differ, but there is a relationship. They seem to measure each other¹s intentions to demonstrate a change within the motionless world of things. They make a kind of dance in which I recognize the preparation for that final moment in which things no longer exist as things. It is, ultimately, the celebration of the first moment, when we catch a glimpse of what is behind us through what is seen and found, in the here and now.
I know that he who lives in stillness never dies.