When you ran as fast as you could to hide behind the trees? Silencing your heart to stop it beating so loudly in your chest in case they heard and found you? Endless laughter written on the delicate paper of a brave explorer’s life.
“When I look at you I find it hard to believe that the whole universe had not conspired to bring you to life. I can’t think of a more beautiful reason for it all to exist than for you in this day.” Atticus
Wolfgang Oude Hengel, sculptor, deep thinker, yogi, intuitive gardener and architect. He works from his huge studio originally part of an old textile factory and his childhood home. His Skeletoni, life-size skeletons take on a rusty life of their own facing the elements in the wild garden. Each joint, limb, and vertebrae is meticulously chiseled into being. The perfectly balanced bodies of iron, embody fragility and interconnectedness, intensity and tenderness. Accompanied by his signature pipe he heats, beats, and bends each joint, limb, and vertebrae into a masterpiece, blending effort with technical mastery. His art navigates the symbolic and the mysterious, merging the visible with the imaginable. A dance between symbolic meaning and mysterious reality, making us question the visible and the imaginable, life and death and beyond.
Maasvlakte 2 is a man-made civil engineering project on reclaimed land. It is an extension of the Port of Rotterdam used for container transport and the chemical industry. A vast industrial landscape of metal and machinery, light and shadows. Seagulls dart back and forth above white plumes of smoke. I’m fascinated by the gigantic scale and beautiful lines of these structures and troubled at the same time how the fragility of the planet remains in balance.
Time a mischievous trickster. One blink and a few hundred years gone. Memories etched on the skins of trees, a closed gate, a lonely succulent. When everyone is asleep, they travel – in dreams past.
