Klecks Klecks

In 1857, Justinus Kerner a doctor and poet, elaborated his folded ink stains into bestiary of the grotesque or ‘creatures of chance’, which were then published alongside his poetry. Long before the pseudoscience of “Rorschach” emerged, Kerner investigated the autonomous possession and animal magnetism in his medical work, attributing these ink creatures to have coming from ‘Hades’ and the ‘other world’.
This idea led to the making of “Klecks Klecks”– in collaboration with Remko Van der Auwera–a 15 meter textile work made using a batik technique that is dyed by the slow melting of ice. As pigment-dusted ice cubes disintegrated, dripping into the folded fabric, the fractal-ed faces of beasts began to emerge.
Installed like a large folded paper, the two rooms that it intersects are distorted reflections of one another. Behind the fabric is a sheltered alcove, where you will find “my right ear is burning” and “my left ear is burning”– stuffed oversized red ears illustrating the feeling of thinking that someone is talking about you. At the center of the fold, is a “klecksographie” of my own, a spider miming, “very normal people”.
These and the other works in “Between Swimming and Dryland” are about the porous corporeal boundary; the kind we want to keep closed and the kind that we cannot help but leave open. As in with Kerners accidental portals to the gothic afterlife, and with our ears, the open orifice that cannot help but hear, even when it doesn’t want to.