ARTIST STATEMENT
My photography draws on personal experiences and intimacy. In my work, I explore how past experiences can manifest themselves in the body, movement and space. It concerns moments in which tension, distance or silence are palpable, but also the possibility of connection and healing.
Previously, I focused primarily on the human body. In my series Wild is the Wind (2022), I explored the expression of dancers in relation to the landscape. That relationship between body and environment has remained central to my way of working ever since. In my recent project Anapnéo – Greek for ‘to breathe again’ – the body never moves independently of its context. Architecture, skin and landscape influence one another and function as carriers of the same physical tension.
This time, my own experiences take centre stage. They form the starting point of the work but are not depicted literally. Instead, I seek images in which their essence can become recognisable to the viewer. What is personal thus becomes shareable without being fixed or explained.
In Anapnéo, the body is used as an instrument to make tension visible and to make way for change. In my collaboration with dancer Ismini Slijper, I work from physical reactions, emotions and impulses that are not choreographed but embodied. This creates a visual language in which looking leads to an experience. My visual language is evolving. Whilst black and white long served as my guiding principle, colour now plays a significant role in my recent work. I use colour to get closer to the experience: as a means of emphasising the physical and the real.
Art offers me comfort. It is a means of exploring experiences, but also of sharing them. In that encounter between creator, image and viewer, space can emerge for recognition, connection and insight.
Simon