This summer I am working on an installation in a large open space in the LUMC Hospital in Leiden.
I am hanging six of my eight-meter long wire-figures by securing them to an iron framework ceiling. The space itself is twenty-one meters high, twenty-one meters deep and eight meters wide. The figures are made out of wire, and because they are so big I make them on the site itself (rather than transporting them). It took me three weeks of fitting and sowing them together.
At first the people here were thinking I was sowing fishing nets, but now they start to look like human figures.
They will be translucent; the light will be able to filter through them.
The most asked question of people passing by is, when will you put clothes on them?
The process of fitting and sewing them together, and now placing them in the space (called ‘the sculpture garden’) reminds me of my own life: trying to find my way, looking for ways to be more comfortable, do things better, stitch my wounds, change my patterns, et cetera.
I realize that everything I do, is a reflection of who I am and of how I am bound by internal and external conditions. Physically but also mentally. Now, while I am working with the wire figures, hanging them with fifty-four strings on the ceiling of the space, it makes me wonder…
I wonder if something created me too. And if I too have a ceiling above my head to which this something is attaching me.
Can I see the figures and the structured framework ceiling of this space as a metaphor for my life? No matter how hard I try, I seem to always be restricted to the hanging points of a ceiling.
This ceiling determines what my presence looks like.
If I am not hanging comfortable at one place, I can start looking for other hanging points, but still I am not completely free. There will always be a pattern above my head that I will have to use. And this pattern of the ceiling will work its way through the shapes and forms of my life.
This is also what I see happening in the wire figures now the installation is coming about. Because of the restriction of the mathematical framework of the ceiling, they appear more or less similar in their postures. I have been trying to go around it, looking for other hanging points, trying to work intuitively and not following the grim mathematical structure of the ceiling. And in doing this making a lot of effort and probably annoying my technical companion and testing his patience.
It works sometimes. I have found some ways to go around the ceiling’s calculated demands regarding their positions.
They are kind of captives of the ceiling’s structure, and therefore a reflection of the characteristics of that ceiling and the space. And again I start wondering if I am too…
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