Nominee Drempelprijs Autonomous Practices 2020
During my graduation, I was researching ways in which dreams can stimulate the imagination through the use of art. I consider it relevant to stimulate the imagination because as an art teacher I notice that students often use google as a default tool to draw inspiration from.
By doing this they aren’t challenged in using their own imagination, which is an important skill since it allows someone to fantasize, think and plan for example. For this reason, I considered it insightful and valuable to teach young adults about dreams in the context of art and imagination because it can show them that their imagination has endless possibilities. Asking people to draw their dreams can be the start of a bigger conversation about what dreams actually are, both generally and personally. How a person experiences their dreams is unique and thus makes a personal starting point of a creative process. Personally, dreams and memories have always been a great source of inspiration for my artistic work and therefore I was able to develop ways in which other people can get inspired by this as well.
My artistic work is usually about suggesting a large phenomenal space into a small physical space. The way in which we tend to frame visuals such as photographs, movies and memories are often so that they become meaningful to us individually. By creating this big phenomenal space I aim to capture a frame which functions as an overviewing perspective of space as it is ours to make meaning of.
Dreams are similar spaces in which all that we deem meaningful comes together in a phenomenal space of which the location and size are unknown. I have a tendency to use the desert as a tool to create this space since it is vast and empty and thus the size of the space is not specific. In doing this I often question the boundary between landscape and abstraction in my work.
In doing this research I constantly challenged myself to look for ways in which my artistic and educational practice could benefit from each other. Which is why in my final work I posed questions in ways so that they could be applied in an educational context, while at the same time suggest a correlation between my artistic work and these questions. This correlation is open for interpretation of the viewer/reader but guided by the attached questions in the book. The series of work in the book are both independent autonomous work which shows how I personally get inspired by memories and dreams and simultaneously as a way to inspire people about the opportunities of their dreams and memories.
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