Conversation
with Eva Wittocx
2022Over the past few years, you have developed a practice in which different media and types of work come together, ranging from drawings to sculptures and spatial interven-tions. I would like to start this conversation by asking about your roots or training as an artist. In what way did studying art attract you as a student?
I started out in graphic design at the academy, but by the time I graduated I was making abstract sculptures and spatial video work. In those four years, I had moved from the flat plane, inherent to graphic design, to three dimensions. Although I switched pretty quickly from design to a more autonomous department, the design aspect – or rather the functional (or not) aspect of things – has remained an important part of my work. Yet it was only after leaving the academy that I felt comfortable with the idea of making art. Shortly after my studies, I lived in Berlin for a while. My endless walks in the city, with its massive and uniform architecture, were inspiring – different from what I was used to in Ghent. My interest in modernist architecture was sparked by Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie and by the archetypal furniture on view at the Bauhaus-Archiv. A few years later I ended up in Amsterdam for my first exhibition at P/////AKT. I got to know many artists in both Berlin and Amsterdam: a very stimulating time. Those early contacts and moments shaped and directed me and my work – probably more so than my formal education.
Could you explain the process of creating a new work or series? What comes first – an interest in a certain material, the choice of a form or image, a feeling, research?
The beginning of a new work or series of works often originates in a specific place. It’s always slightly different, but I think the spatial context is decisive, even if it’s just visiting the same place over and over again or walking down the same street and suddenly noticing something. It could also be the rhythm or the frequency with which ordinary, everyday things pass by, repeatedly. Gertrude Stein put it as follows: “I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition. The inevitable seeming repetition in human expression is not repetition, but insistence.” At that moment of inevitable repetition, both the form and the material may lead to working on something concrete. Then, the search for which precise form and which precise material starts, whereby the one is not predominant over the other, and intuition and decision-making go hand in hand.
I am interested in the types of materials we use to shape our surroundings. Often, they are synthetic materials, all kinds of plastics such as laminate, melamine and acrylic, but also other chemical compounds such as concrete, and industrially shaped materials such as steel and other metals. I then connect materials and forms with each other and look for a kind of field of tension. The series Spinning Lines, Twisting Thoughts – corian, for instance, orig-inated in walks around Brooklyn, New York, where I noticed the metal rail-ings around the houses and windows. They are countless lines that cross one another and create grids by moving in front of and behind one another, which is to say that I move so the lines move along with me. I made drawings of them and then decided to execute a selection of the forms in solid surface, an easily washable plastic that is used in kitchens. In my sculptures, the separate pieces are placed in front of and behind each other so that they form a kind of script.
In other works, not only the form and material are essential to the creation process, but also the technical skill required, which needs to be learned to make the work. The series Carpet Beater Carpet consists of tufted carpets.
At its core is the motif of the carpet-beater, a kind of wink: a non-functional carpet-beater incorporated as an emblem in the carpet that the carpet-beater consequently can no longer beat. Here, I began with the curled shapes of the carpet-beater, which I sketched out. The choice of the material or technique went hand in hand with the choice of the carpet-beater motif. I then taught myself the technique of tufting, which fits both my way of working in terms of rhythm and repetition, and the rhythmic beating of a carpet. Both the tufting and the beating are meditative and repetitive acts — likewise the sound they make.
The series of drawings Striped Knitwear and Crochet Series further dissect con-crete actions such as knitting and crocheting. They are series of pencil draw-ings with knitting patterns as diagrams, and crochet instructions as patterns. The rhythm of the act of drawing and the meditative aspect of repetition are important to me here. It is not only a schematic representation of knitting and crochet, but also a schematic representation of the act itself.
Research, concept and production are interlinked. What role does intuition play in this? When you start in the studio, do you usually have a clear idea in advance of where you want to end up?
When I start in the studio, some decisions have already been made, but not all. There is an idea and often a technique that I want to use. There are also many constraints – the space I work in, the resources I have, the techniques I have mastered…the fact that these constraints are there helps to shape the work and makes me feel comfortable. During a residency in the US, in 2017, I started making the drawings of the Striped Knitwear series because I couldn’t transport any works back home. In the most recent works, such as the carpets, a particular technique or skill is part of the work’s subject.
Intuition in my work seems to be something between control and letting go. Starting from limitations and concrete ideas, there must be enough room to let things happen. That is why it is important to allow for a sensitive aspect in my work; otherwise it would become rather rigid.
Sometimes coincidence also plays a role. The first dust clouds came about after I sanded a piece of red MDF for a small sculpture. There was a beautiful glow on the wall, like a sun. Only much later did I start to “apply” the dust particles to a stencil taped on the wall. I gradually became very good at this technique. Making things happen is a balance between active and passive. The anthropologist Tim Ingold described it as “going along with material”. He uses the metaphor of a rope that is twined in the opposite direction, that keeps on twisting, thus becoming a very strong material.
The use of colour also clearly seems to play a role. We see primary colours but also light, rather harmonious, shades. In the recent carpets, the colours even have a vintage feel. Could you tell us something about colour in your work?
The colours of my work have evolved a lot over the past twelve years. My graduation works at KASK and the structures in my first solo in Amsterdam, in 2011, were very dark – mostly black and also literally heavy. I have only gradually allowed colour in, with lighter structures and more movement. Perhaps intuition and feeling play a role, and I also believe my use of colour is somehow connected to my state of mind and personal development.
In recent work, certain colours are an explicit choice; the red and blue in Striped Knitwear, for instance, refer to those typical striped Saint James jumpers. At the same time, I had limited colours available for the propelling pencil I draw with. The colours in the tufted carpets are based on those of school uniforms – blue, burgundy and dark green – as the carpet-beater curls reminded me of emblems. The yellow here is related to an old IKEA carpet at home, from the 1970s or ’80s, with stripes and geometric shapes in ochre and purple.
Besides the forms that you draw and elaborate into structures, you also work with existing images and concrete references to reality. What role do those photographic images play?
The images that I incorporate into my work are all of landscapes. I am specifically looking for images without indications of human activity. This is of course paradoxical, as the very concepts of “landscape” and “nature” are human-made, and every image of nature has been created by someone.
For my first landscape objects, I used nature images from an online database, but later I replaced them with self-made landscape photographs. The work Background Hum, a polygonal object on which a landscape photograph is pasted, was initially a way of looking outside, but instead of looking out of a window, the looking outside happens by way of an object. It was about invert-ing foreground and background, reversing inside and outside, and disrupting the image by pasting it onto an object or an irregular wall.
One way or another, the body always plays a role in my work. The making process is very physical, and the objects on the floor in the room function as characters.
The exhibition Background Hum at c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e was conceived as a perfor-mative route through objects in the margins of the space, which were some-times deduplicated as dust clouds on the wall. I call it performative because the shapes and intensity of the colours changed according to the position of the spectator. The ephemeral dust-works in particular have a performative character, both through how they are made and their changeability.
How important is physically making your own work like this?
The making process and the use of my own body are at the heart of my work. Over the years, I have used a whole repertory of materials and media, ranging from wood to concrete, dust particles and textiles. I have developed a number of skills in order to work these materials. I have been mainly mak-ing textile works recently, but there is also a group of larger, more geometric works that consist of hard materials. The organic aspect of the textile works contrasts with the hard geometry of wooden volumes, but the principle of “making it myself” is the same.
In order to make a living, I often need to carry out side jobs, such as installa-tion of exhibitions. A while ago, I was painting a wall in a museum – the only woman among a group of men. While painting I listened to a podcast about Silvia Federici. It was about women’s bodies being reduced to “reproduction” and domestic work and the unpaid labour it involves. Painting walls, sawing boards or pouring concrete, as well as tufting carpets, comes so naturally to me that the question of what is feminine or masculine is very odd and intuitively feels very arbitrary to me.
Some of my works refer to the domestic, especially the most recent ones, such as Carpet Beater Carpet and Striped Knitwear. The invisible work done by “housewives”, but also by workers or maintenance staff, is certainly one of the themes addressed in Carpet Beater Carpet. The above works are textile works, created with so-called “soft skills”. In the arts, these “soft skills” are often attributed to female artists — women often being assigned a certain medium. Anni Albers, for instance, wanted to study painting, but the women at the Bauhaus were generally pushed towards the weaving department. In this sense, women’s abilities are artificially limited and often still linked to the domestic context they emerged from. For me, the emphasis on “soft skills” and their supposed natural correlation with women is largely historically imposed. I consider making things myself a kind of silent protest against the expecta-tions around female artists (or women in general).
Finally, I would like to dwell on the titles you use. Sometimes they are descriptive, at other times they seem far-fetched. Sound also seems to play a role.
Usually, a group of works are given the same title. Often, they are made for one specific exhibition, in which every work is given the title of the exhibition. This applies to almost all works, except those that were made in series, such as the carpets and the drawings.
Background Hum refers to a humming and repetitive sound in the backdrop. I like to refer to sound, and have a special interest in rhythm and repetition. “Background hum” also refers to noise in the background of a recording. For me, titles should also contribute to the work in a poetic way.
Spinning Lines, Twisting Thoughts was the title of an exhibition for the nomadic platform Change-Change, in Budapest, in 2017. It was the first time that I gave the line a central role, whereas before volumes or planes tended to pre-dominate. The title refers to that change or conclusion. A title never takes over, however. It is always an attempt to convey in a linguistic way what is at stake. In Budapest, I used a thick pack of rope to make sculptures. The black-and-white ropes had been produced by a rope-maker. I later created a red-and-white version for an exhibition in London, at VITRINE Gallery, in 2019. The colour of the ropes was a reference (on an enlarged scale) to the kitchen string you can buy at the supermarket. Together with the dust clouds, the rope sculptures are the most exciting works to make. They only come into being when the work is installed. In the case of the ropes, particularly, the material finds its own way, and you have to deal with its physicality and with gravity. What’s more, the works disappear afterwards, reverting to a bundle of wound lines in the case of rope, or simply vanishing into thin air in the case of the dust.
Sawing a plank is like going for a walk, the title of this book, is a phrase that I have been carrying around with me for a while. It concerns the meditative nature of making and, again, of forming lines. Both sawing and walking create lines and patterns. Making art is a kind of automatism for me. Sometimes, it is like taking a walk without going anywhere specific. At some point you arrive, anyway.