RACHEL DE JOODE NETHERLANDS
Rachel De Joode
Rachel De Joode a Dutch-born multimedia artist that makes weird and funny things out of random stuff making them 3-dimensional. She pulls her ideas from a well-worn household items, faux finishes, gags, props and food, leaving us to tease out hidden meanings that don’t always exist. She explores for their material agency, not only their communication with us but with each other and their context.
In her art works, skin plays a central role in ‘The Molten Inner Core’. She has said that the average human adult carries roughly 2kg of dead skin, the surface of which is shedding every two weeks. That layer is therefore useful to De Joode when understanding a physical interaction between things, and investigating when a thing changes form.
She also uses food a lot in her works. She has stated that “Food is omnipresent in human existence, which is what I like about it. It’s a primal and common element, which makes it something that anybody can relate to as a signifier.” (Bullet.com). A chicken for her embodies consumption, globalization and production. De Joode didn’t want to take a political stance with it so she pointed out the oddity and melancholy of humans turning a bird into an inanimate object that’s mass-produced and distributed.
Aside from that her other other works, ‘White Pedestal Thing’ and ‘Sculpted Human Skin in Rock’ explores the co-dependence and understanding of pedestal and sculpture. Each object is acting in a non-hierarchical grouping, a print, the ink, the frame, the floor, a pedestal, a sculpture and even the artist herself retains a potential to become (melt into) another thing.
For her to achieve this look of randomness, De Joode relies on blending sculpture and photography, while arranging, documenting and dismantling her creations. The process reveals a tension between the physical life of an artwork and its afterlife in cyberspace.
