MEET & GREET

How do we deal with our memories nowadays? Which are misinterpreted, fabricated, distorted? How do we identify the real from the imagined?
In this exhibition I offer a psychological and emotional travel from reality, intensifying from subtle alterations to the most bizarre fabrications. Ensembles of different materials and shapes serve as second and third layers of certainties and sentiments creating a series of non-verbal statements and strong visual confrontations.
Photography: Alexandra Colmenares Cossio

My making process is a volatile space where my status as a maker and the status of my objects are in a constant conversation. What role do I have to play while the identity of an object is being formed? The mould defines the edges of the object, yet, together with the materials, it has the power to change and reform my creation. They are the ones that take control over themselves as an object.

In her work, Amparo is always looking for the subtlety of a feeling hidden in the most unexpected of moments. Such as suddenly becoming aware of an image or an idea. For example? A beautiful, white, pure, snowy landscape where many have tread, thereby reducing the snow to slush. That very short in-between moment, when beautiful purity collapses into complete chaos. Her works are always an abstract, intuitive way of coming to terms with these unconscious, intense experiences; with the absurdity of emotions.

The basic idea in the new collection Around and About by Gésine Hackenberg is to capture the shape and the energy that emerges from movement and rotation. The series focuses on clay as main material and the process of throwing on a potter’s wheel. Here, Gésine Hackenberg merges associations of whirling bodies or spinning tops with classical vessel shapes. They materialize a certain concentrated state of mind that is inherent to the dynamics of spinning with a literal and metaphorical balanced centre.
At this point, the ceramic container turns into a vessel for the human spirit.
Photography: Gésine Hackenberg

This work is all about my childhood. Unforgotten memories of past events are integrated into it. The applied technique here is ‘pâte de verre’ in which it is possible to reshape the glass while it is still hot (folding, pulling and stretching).
Photography: Steven van Kooijk

My pieces are not decorative but I believe that if you look at them carefully you will find the hidden fascinations and meanings (= silence) I use the casual discoveries in daily life and small findings in physical phenomena to create jewellery pieces using humor and wit in minimalistic ways. To expand the possibilities of jewellery, even if they are small objects, I like to challenge myself. The humor and wit in my work connect me to the person wearing my pieces, as well as to the people who see them.

Mieke Everaet shows a series of bowl variations–the ideal form which reflects the authenticity of porcelain. The starting point is the bowl, simple and complex at the same time. The bowls are made up of pigmented kaolin clay in white, gray and black colour areas. Wavy, convex, concave and angular shapes and lines alternate and play a dynamic game. The bottom of the bowl-shape is often sloping, as a result of which one can look under it, giving the form a sense of lightness. The interior space has a strong presence and is related to the outdoor space. It is the essence of the work, ‘in’ and ‘out’ fade seamlessly into one another. By blending the different shapes together, the perception of the space challenges continuously.
Shape, colour and structure are fused into one single unit, the bowl-shape. The approach is clear and without any detours.
Translation: Ilse Hens / photography: Michèle Francken

Nicolas Van Vosselen has been making collages and assemblages since many years. He usually works on a small scale, with a lot of attention to detail. Materials and colours are carefully chosen in function of the composition.
Text fragments and titles, seemingly picked at random, play an important role. Should his work perhaps be seen as pages from catalogues of non-existing objects or as diagrams illustrating essays of discarded sciences?

Ria Lins
Amazement at interpersonal relationships and the adaptability to the diversity of our society are threads that can be found throughout the work of Ria Lins. The way jewels can be worn and, above all, the way jewels behave are primordial in her design. Key words for her jewellery collection are connection, contact, link, relationship and coherence. Photographs of her work are just one fraction of their presentation. It is better to feel the pieces. They are extremely tactile and soft. They feel like fabric and the movement they make while walking is both poetical and unique.

Beniti Cornelis
Power is born out of chance, founded by tenderness and pain. The genesis of symbols has been ripened by century old emotions.

‘KGB’ shows new works by Kim Buck (Denmark), Tore Svensson (Sweden) and Karin Seufert (Germany). The title contains initials, representing the cities of Copenhagen (København), Gothenburg (Göteborg) and Berlin, the cities where each of the artists lives and where the exhibition was shown in the last years. The three artists have a great deal in common regarding their viewpoints on jewellery and materials.
Image: Kim Buck

Fruit and vegetables titillate and beguile our senses. These same qualities are also essential in jewellery.

Photography: Rutger Graas/Gésine Hackenberg

To jot down experience at once; to break it down and rewrite it through gesture. To pile image upon image in a layered bustle – vast, yet full of fidgety observations of detail. A tapestry of colouristic contrasts. Diego Joosten’s working process is an agile one and gives way to new pictorial spaces and a boundless variety of techniques as fragments of a wider landscape. Start the dialogue, without translation.
Translation: Kristof Dams

The unnatural, that too is natural.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

I am not copying, neither denying or defeating nature. It`s more like echoing it, filtering it through my inner soils. Until it becomes the same, mirror in the mirror. I am not sure where to draw the line. The only thing I know is what I feel. And it`s an urge, it`s the call of creating. So all the forms are gowing out of my fingers like grass from the ground. Until my art becomes nature. Let it be then burlesque, arabesque and baroque – nature full of itself. Naturesque.

* Urban Dictionary: An adjective that describes something very attractive in nature, something that has striking natural beauty and is acellent in the world.

Through the eyes of the artist Geir Nustad, we look at the world, dissected into images, portrayed into glass objects. “In my Graal works I capture the life I am living and the lives I see being lived around me. Commenting on our surroundings, the big cities and the society we are living in. A reflection on the world and the way it changes.” The images are a mix of self-made and found photos. Nustad uses the tools of new technology in combination with old techniques, creating a new and different expression in the Graal objects, capturing photographic images inside the glass. “I am trying to bridge the use of glass as a material both in craft and fine arts, creating a deeper connection between the object and the spectator.”