THE ISLAND
​2018- onwards

For the last couple of years I've been working on a multimedia project which I call 'the island'. 
Inspired by a small man made tropical island that I visit often when paddling out at sea, where I catch myself time and time again unconsciously pretending to be on a deserted island like in my childhood favourite film; 'the Blue Lagoon' or "Robinson Crusoe". 
 
Living in Singapore, the third most densely populated country in the world, it is nearly impossible to 'get away', a problem which I automatically solve by my large imagination and ability to block out views I do not want. 
All around the island are hundreds of container ships. 
Any island near 'my island" is developed into either touristy places where music can be heard constantly, or into industries like the so called "Shell (the company) island" or 'the garbage island', where Singapore, because of lack of space, dumps and processes it's millions of tons or trash. The horizon is basically industrial. Once these were beautiful tropical idyllic islands in a clean, blue sea. 
By nature, I tend to look away from all this, and focus on beauty. The real world is often not of my liking. 
Perception. 
I create my own world that way.

This is resulting in a body of work; video, printmaking, large scale drawings and photographs. 
In this body of work, I play with the idea of paradise, storytelling, exoticism, sanity-insanity, a voyage into discovery where I, as a naturalist, discover a world that is fake, and thus, so does the viewer. The rocks are hollow and are falling apart. The sand is imported. The rocky shore are rows of stones neatly set side by side. The island isn't isolated at all. On the contrary. The man made paradise (man as creator, acting as God) is a failure. Utopia - dystopia.. 
But could you say that it is part of evolution still ? This urge to create ? Man as creator ? 
Darwin writes in "the Voyage of the Beagle"; 
"Man at last has been enabled to understand his own role, his own true position in nature and in the world we live in.'

The island; excerpts video (work in progress)
vimeo.com/864311500?share=copy
vimeo.com/864312896?share=copy
vimeo.com/864314045?share=copy
vimeo.com/865006513?share=copy

​The Island; drawings based on filmstills Lord of the flies

The drawings are based on film stills from the movie “Lord of the Flies”, a 1954 novel by William Golding. (Films; 1963 and 1990). The setting and circumstances are utopian. A group of boys stranded on an uninhabited island.
But the story is a different one. It portrays the boys’ descent into savagery; left to themselves on a paradisiacal island, far from modern civilisation, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state. A dystopian story about loss of innocence and savagery.
 
Uninhabited islands representing paradise and children representing innocence, the drawings are about the first impression and how the image is not to be trusted. The titles guide the viewer in how to read the work, provide a context and give a different view to that first impression and make the viewer have another look and wonder what really happened.  

from left to right;
​
"This is an island. At least I think it's an island. That's a reef out in the sea.'
​"A kind of glamour was spread over them and the scene and they were conscious of the glamour."
​"It's a tribe. They made us. we couldn't help it." 
​"Even the butterflies deserted the open space where the obscene thing grinned and dripped"

Click on image for further details.

​"Once more, amid the breeze, the shouting, the slanting sunlight on the high mountain, was shed that glamour, that strange invisible light of friendship, adventure and content" ,
charcoal on canvas,
90 x 160 cm,
​2018

"We may stay here till we die"
67 x 67 cm,
charcoal on canvas,
​2018.