SOURCES AND LITERATURE:

LITERATURE AND PODCAST:
BOUCHEZ, HILDE. "A Wild Thing". 2020. Art Paper Editions. ISBN 9789493146464

episodes Silence and episode Hearing, Overthink Podcast,
3.
DAUENHAUER, BERNARD P. “On Silence.” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 3, 1973, pp. 9–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24654255. Accessed 11 June 2023.


PHOTOS and Pictures of historical hats:
My pinterest board:
https://pin.it/2EktiZU

my older drawing where objects become things

S I L E N C E

S P E A K I N G

T O T H E

N O I S Y

M I N D S

I chose to create a hat. I was enchanted by the affluent history of headwear where all shapes, materials, colours flourish while today‘s hats are seen usually just as a functional element.

My aim was to liberate this object.

I started my first attempts playing with an idea of the shape of a knitted/crochet hat, trying to reform it’s today’s design. Then I sketched a lot, I set a colour palette, did material tests.

I wanted to create a piece which would stay in my life and would not be put in a drawer and be forgotten.

Material.

The non-living? The noncommunicating?

Or are we actually just not aware of its language?

It cannot speak but it can express itself fully.

In the world where most people listen just to thoughts in their heads.

Not seeing the value and beauty beyond thing’s functionality.

Material is desperate to be seen, felt, sensed. Acknowledged. Understood.

Our projections wouldn’t be tangible without the material. Our ideas are as important as the material.

Anything that we create is always interaction with material. It is on us which approach we choose.

SPRING 2023

But only then I realised it is not in the shape or in its colour of the final hat but it is in my personal connection with it.

When I arrived to Gent I felt overwhelmed, feeling noise inside out. I wanted to know where it was coming from. It was challenging my focus. I started to understand that I cannot simply cover my ears to escape it beacause I realised that the noise, the sounds, are inscribed in objects.
These are the everyday objects, functional products like billboards, single use products. These objects made from verbally silent materials, that cannot express themselves in speach. Thus they are overflown by ideas of their creator. In the process of designing objects such as a chair, a vase, shoes, creator who is deaf to the voice of the material, sees the material only as something with positive and negative qualities to serve his function. And as a concequence the originality of the material itself is overshadowed and it’s voice is suffocated.

I see art more as communication now.

It is honest, respectful way of communicating with the material. Where language is just one way of interaction.

The material doesn’t need to be translated into words. It needs to be sensed by us with all of our senses.

I think we desperately need to learn how to silence our minds and learn how to find personal connection with materials. This is the way we make possible for them to be a part of our society and thus prolong their lives.

My installation leads observers to come closer to the object, to be tempted to touch it, explore it and then describe their experience on the attatched paper.

The „material playground“ circle that surrounds final creation, serves to experience all kinds of materials in the moment when the idea of a specific creation is still open.

Allow me to finish with a quotation from Bernard P. Dauenhauer’s essay „On Silence“, which really touched me:

my mother's final creation

MINOR Autonomous Design

I understood that by silencing my mind I give the space to the material, otherwise silenced. Suddenly it is not only seen but fully sensed.

“There is the awareness that the doing of silence opens me to meet the other. The other, too, is finite and needs my yielding to reach me. Similarly there is the awe-filled realization that I, in my sound expression, have a responsibility for letting the other appear. My silence acknowledges this awesome responsibility. ...Silence shows itself as a yielding which binds and joins.” p. 20

colour palette

In my drawings I like to collect objects, things, their shapes, structures.

Material tests and my first hats.

friends and strangers interacting with materials