I’ve always been telling stories. This habit comes from a family tradition. My ancestors liked to make children believe in the extraordinary. Born in the Netherlands in 1981, I grew up in the French countryside from the age of 10. My family education stayed in Dutch, my mother tongue, whilst my intellectual learning would be in French.
My work as a visual storytelling artist circles around the central themes of false appearances, the house and the sensation of constraint, childhood wonder and fears. Often articulated around the use of video my works flourishes in many other mediums like sculpture, drawing or photography reunited in architectural installation. My work questions in particular the process of a narrative construction that emerges from playful and fictionalized associations of memories and family anecdotes. The intimate and banal statue of these stories is overruled through the staging and the physical and emotional impact procured by the installation. The action is redeployed to an environment with a spectacular scale, required for the uncanny and marvelous. I transmit my stories and play out their effective tensions within the exhibition space.
I’m interested in architecture and interior spaces that have a theatrical aspect, or that show a sense of accumulation and excess. Throughout the last couple of years I’ve been interested in recreational architecture: pavilions, follies, grottos, kiosks, and seaside second houses… These constructions are discharged of the representation function and the seriousness of the permanent house. They have the particularity off showing the more fanciful aspect of the architect and the owner’s mind. Here the confusion and strangeness off shapes, colors and textures and the unlimited use of artifice are accepted. Like Les Esseintes’s house in Huysmans’s A Rebours novel, these constructions allow to forget everyday life routine and own a space that’s at the same time a home and an elsewhere.