The Basement Gallery
: : F E A T U R E D A R T I S T S T A T E
M E N T :
:
Hedwig Brouckaert
Magazines and newspapers are the source of my recent work. I
work with magazines that
people give me or with what I can find in local libraries
and bookshops. Depending on where
I am I get different material. I transfer images of figures, tracing them by hand, one by one,
and layering them. The
figures lose their personal characteristics and become part of a mass,
a
zigzagging chaos of lines.
I am interested in the tension between the highly representational
and readable starting point
mostly advertisements, which have to get a message
across as clearly as possible - and the
abstracted, illegible result of the
layering process. The final drawing is a sort of compact
image of the
whole magazine: All the information is in there, but condensed and illegible.
The
media defines our experience of the world and reality extensively, maybe more
than
our
direct experiences do.
The acts of cataloguing, categorizing
and ordering are fascinating to me. I
rearrange the
magazines following different sets of rules. I order the
images of figures, for example, by
magazine issue, or by posture: standing, seated,
lying down. Following these principles,
I lose a degree of control over
how a drawing will eventually look. That tension between
chaos and
order, serendipity and control is what I seek to visualize.