Do not go gentle — intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood

EDITION

2019

school

Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (HKU)
Utrecht, The Netherlands

Do not go gentle is a project which features an installation in the shape of a playground. This playground consists of clay sculptures that represent various play equipment which is no longer suitable for children. They lose their function, but the emphasis of their shape remains.

The project also consists of an artist book. The book consists of three combined chapters – starting with children’s drawings from ages 1-3, a phase in which no realistic shapes can be drawn yet, only abstract shapes, but when a circle can be drawn the child becomes aware of its identity. They are combined with microscopic images of nanoparticles and immortalized cell lines of human lungs, provided by the University of Leiden. Autonomous images are incorporated into the book, made intuitively and connecting intermediate visual themes. Part of the book is printed on semi-transparent PVC, so that the images enter into a direct relationship with each other. The child-adult systems that are visualized are linked to each other in their aesthetic representation.
Together, the iconoclastic installation and artist book research representations of contemporary phenomena humanity is leaving behind for the following generation.