Sounds of the Sea, Crickets and Translucent Yellow is a poetic reflection of the artistic process. The video combines two identical statues; one is situated in a park close to Nagoya, the other by the sea in a small town in the Netherlands. The work focuses not on the historical associations that statues often entail, but rather on the way the statues function as representatives of the environment they are placed in. My point of departure for this work was the ability to be in two places at the same time through the senses.

The filmmaker Chris Marker often combined footage from different places and travels. His film Sans Soleil, however, opens with the occasional impossibility of combining certain images. With Sounds of the Sea, Crickets and Translucent Yellow I wanted to see if I could combine the sounds of the two statues. The statues function here as anthropomorphic objects that reflect their immediate surroundings – the park and the seashore. The camera movements and the sounds alter the viewers’ perception of the static statues.

While making this video I asked myself: how do we reorganise certain references, impressions, and objects to create our own reality? How much of the explanations surrounding our own work is based on fiction? The narratives that determine us are often infused with imaginative longings, the same goes for the stories that surround our work, like all stories, they are a way for us to make our experiences intelligible. According to the literary theorist Mieke Bal, our need to collect certain books, references, and images is an essential human feature that originates in the need to tell stories.

While reflecting on my artistic practice, I stumbled upon something nameless that has run parallel to my art making for as long as I can remember. This ‘thing’ seemed to evade every attempt to name or capture it. At first it scared me because I was unable to rationalise it, but then I came to realise that this nameless entity is in fact my imagination. I continued to create subtle alternate realities out of the situations I encountered. While doing this, I felt related to a mode of thinking expressed by the artist Janet Cardiff: ‘I like the concept that there is no truth, no one great masterpiece from a subject. There can be one situation and ten realities.’ I think that these different realities arise out of the relationships that we establish with our surroundings, they derive from the human need to place things and to place oneself.

 

 

 

 

 

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