about my work

"As an artist I work with movement, expressed in performances and descriptive writings.
In 1979, after graduating from art school - and inspired by classical ballet lessons by Frank Polak, theatre classes by Jan Ritsema and developments in performance, conceptual and minimal art - my artistic activities took on concrete form in a series of greatly slowed-down movements of my body. These movements, which I still perform,  force me to focus on the relationship between body-shape and tension on the one hand, and space, time and gravity on the other.
After initially situating my movements in the artificial space and time of the theatre stage, I confronted myself with the actual space of architecture and landscape, and the actual time of history and the movement of light and dark in nature.
This gave rise to 'movement sculptures' - which would sometimes extend across large distances of both space and time - for which I also invited other people to participate.
My movements assume strict forms, patterns and procedures which can also be found in ritual ceremonies as well as in children's games; lines, circles, repetitions, symmetrical or cyclic movements, contradictions, imitations, simultaneities and expanded durations.
Besides physical movements also physical sound, such as voices and the rolling on drums, became an important element in my expressions of energy.

Energy, and its registration, was also the starting point and subject matter for drawings; initially as direct representation of movements of the body, and later as written deposits of linguistic and numeric data of movements in the actual world around me: reports on weather- and water levels, history books and geographical and anatomical atlases.
These representations of space and time, based on published data, were followed by my own observations of situations and processes, described in words and sentences: language became the source and subject matter of my work in both written and spoken form, text and voice being the tools for rendering my perception of space and time, into space and time."

Recently performed: Rotations and Spirals on various inside and outside locations.
Recently published: lying 2018 and moving - writing 2020 both home-published.
I curated performance events such as Words Live (4 editions) and Music and Film, and between 2004 and 2014 organised the programme of Sub Urban Video Lounge in Rotterdam, partly together with Kathrin Wolkowicz.
Besides my own artistic practice I also participate in the performance of text/voice-based works of other artists a.o. Arf Arf (Melbourne), Rosie Heinrich, Hans Stevens, André Castro.
I worked in collaboration with Myriam van Imschoot, Samuel Vriezen, Tim Etchells, Marcus Bergner, Dick Raaijmakers, Kathrin Wolkowicz, Cora Schmeiser, Henk Geraedts, Antoine Beuger, Cem Güney and the artists couple Doris Denekamp and Geert van Mil.

I enjoyed movement coaching by Ciel Werts, dancer and movement-educator, speech coaching by Petri Snoeck, speech therapist and voice coaching by Janneke van der Putten, voice performer.
I learned much about language and writing from my collaborations with Dick van Teylingen, writer and poet and Kathrin Wolkowicz, artist/editor as well as from Guus Vreeburg, art historian.