*the ‘iris’ (1988-1989), ‘body-sculpture’
Dance: Mattie Vrins, Pierre Paradis
camera: Henk van Dijk.
about ‘the Iris’
This ‘iris’ work is the work I prepared as my final examination work project at the Rietveld Academy. This work also took me the longest to create and was probably the most difficult one to be made.
I was asked by my tutor then, the late Onno Boekhoudt, to prepare a new body-sculpture and performance to come with it.
It was a time when the unknown was much greater and piled higher than the known. I was very much struggling in life. Plenty in my life was unknown, running from clear to un-clear and often stayed there. There were many extremes, from very obvious to unobvious things. as one eye saw it this way…cold very cold and on the other eye, the other way warm very warm …
I was looking for some balance between these two extreme elements, it led me into the creation of this ‘iris’, a new ‘body-sculpture’ piece which combines these different elements.
Due to the choice of different material I was faced with several technical difficulties, plenty restrictions so just naturally the performance and the choreography had to be adapted and changed into much slower movements than originally planned.
