#13: Play of different shadows

At the end of this whole journey into the shadow, I felt at some point, I was kind of bored of the shadow. I also felt that the shadow was not only despair and darkness, and that there were also colored shadows and that there is multi fractured shadows in a spiritual way or philosophical way. I wanted to depict this.

So I set out to basically make a kind of a photographic version of the Black Square from Malevich, the famous Russian painter. And I thought what the interesting thing about the Black Square, the work of Malevich, is that he kind of compressed the whole idea of the not knowing of the shadow and death into this kind of human size, abstract shape that we can project all our fears and our longing onto. For me, the Black Square from Malevich, which is kind of the ultimate artwork, because it has everything inside of it.

I can tell you some a little bit about how this is made. So basically, what you see here is pieces of Perspex, colored Perspex, and a mirror. Here there's a mirror, and here's the piece of Perspex. Actually, at first, I didn't plan to make these. They would just came by chance, because I was making the large ones, the red fly, the green fly, and they are basically not even that big, they're like this big. And I had them on little threads hanging.

But at some point I needed to rest a little bit. So I put them in the sand. This was in Namibia in the desert at the Sossusvlei. And then I saw this and I thought that looks actually pretty beautiful. I asked my boyfriend at the time, my now husband to hold the Perspex above. So you see the mirror, this is the shadow of him holding the Perspex. And then here, you see, this blue part is actually the mirror which is projecting the sky. This is the sky which you see. And then here, this is also very nice to see because this is the very thin line is actually the mirror. Then this part is the shadow of the mirror, and this part is the reflection of the sun.