pictures courtesy of Sara De Graeve
Eternal chamber
—
Manon Clement
free, ongoing expo (Het Verdiep)
fr 13.05 — fr 27.05
on view all day, every day during the hours of the bar
Manon Clement (1997, BE) is a visual artist, she studied Textile Design at Luca School of Arts in Ghent and obtained her Master degree. The techniques Clement mainly works with are jacquard weaving, industrial knitting, and screen printing. Her work will always start from the word and will further develop in the space of textiles. Poetic words are always in search of a tangibility, for a place where they create meaning. By adding words to a material she involves her viewers in the conceptual meaning of her work, in this way an attempt at dialogue is created.
Manon's work is mainly about the loss of a word, the loss of touch, but also the loss of a certain 'you', this ‘you’ stand for her father who she lost a few years ago. In a way, she always tries to incorporate her father into the works. The 'you' in all the different meanings of the word. ‘You' as a supernatural reality. ‘You' as an intangible dimension. ‘You’ as thoughts. ‘You’ as the word. ‘You’ as the work. ‘You’ as matter. ‘You’ as you.
Words connect themselves to textiles and become interwoven in the context and connotations that textiles have to offer. The word always needs a surface, a space, in order not to get lost in its transience. The materials make words visible and tangible. Words are given existence, they are given a space. Without these spaces, words are lost in their multiplicity and transience. Textiles give lost words a space. Written or printed words are given existence. Words are caught in a defined place from which they cannot escape.
Words and images want to redeem themselves from the transience. These images come from Clement's personal image archive, by making them unrecognizable she can create a distance in the work. The images are also mirrored, in this way she can create an eternal place in which her words and father can continue to exist forever.
︎ ︎