TERRAM, 2015
It all has to do with worshipping and warding off. Near ancient temples archeologists often find many statues, ananthemata; in Catholic churches certain sacred effigies are surrounded by numerous little metal plates depicting a part of the body, ex voto's; In Japanese temple grounds there are screens filled with small wooden plaques, ema, on which the visitors have written their prayers, and in India particular Buddha statues are graced with a sheet of gold-leaf with each visit of the faithful. Through these practices people transfer their emotions to an object.
A similar phenomenon is present in Ruudt Peters’ jewellery, his pieces often originate from his personal experiences. Looking back, his oeuvre might be considered to be an abstracted diary of his existence. For this exhibition he has gilded a number of his older pieces time and again: a life in 11 stations, iam.
His new work - pendants, necklaces and some brooches - consists of representations of the foot: big and small, flat or spatial, made from earthenware, porcelain, alabaster, hematite or plastic; caged in or cherished by silver wire or leather. Feet are an important motif for Peters, their shape appeared already several times in his previous series. The foot is a symbol with many connotations; in the dictionary the lemma occupies nearly a full page with expressions ranging from 'to dig in one's feet' to 'having feet of clay'. Still, feet can also be warm and sensuous, and that is exactly what Peters' hand-shaped earthenware pendants refer to.
Most of all the interpretations arise from the fact that our feet provide a foundation for our existence, and they allow us to venture into the world. By combining such associative meanings with the wearibility of jewellery, Ruudt Peters new work seem almost to be intended to be used as a talisman, Terram.
Ward Schrijver
Copyrights: Gallery Rob Koudijs, Amsterdam
Feetking
Rik sat with his friend René on the beach when the soft sand a boy licking an ice cream just walked past them. Rik saw it immediately and René well. The right foot of the boy had only three toes. The fourth and fifth digits were missing and also the part of his foot where the toes should sit missing. They looked after the boy startled to René said that the boy must have had an accident and fixed was not born that way. Rik found it ver¬schrikkelijk. In the loose sand looked like the boy very well kun¬nen walk, but on the street? And he might wear a shoe on that foot? Rik looked at his own feet and to that of René. He himself had sturdy feet, good to walk with and play football. Of René were narrower and more elegant. He looked like to, simply because they were of René.
Every day, Rik came past the house. It was in a posh street and had a platform with four steps and a smeed¬ijzeren fence. The heavy door had a glim¬mend ge¬poets¬te polished brass knob. It was a tall house, four rows of windows with lace curtains above the other, and a cornice above the heavens. On a marble plate was in gold letters: REX A. PIED. The people called him Mr. Piet. His mother said Piejee "because it was French and meant 'foot'. 'Rex' was Latin and beteken¬de 'king' and according to his mother, it was also a first name. Rik kind of liked it. A few times he had seen leaving a tall man in a fur coat the house. In this house lived so closely king. Rik knew very confident and often thought about the mysterious man in that beautiful house.
One night years later he had a strange dream. The foot king stood in the open door of the house and invited Rick to come from within. He brought him into a large salon. On a low round table was a statue of a boy who carefully pulls a thorn from the sole of his left foot. For a moment he thought he saw René sitting there.
"That's by removers, a famous bronze statue from the first century BC," said the king foot. Of course, it was not René. He looked around ver¬baasd. Along the walls were high cabinets with many shelves above each other and on those shelves were feet, lots of ceramic, silver and alabaster feet. Just bare feet, big and small, narrow and wide. They looked like living feet. The most curious was that there was a leg on each foot but as he was the only looked up the leg dissolved into thin air. He glanced once more go along shelves and suddenly he saw the foot. A foot with three toes. He remained there astonished stare and thought of the boy he had ever seen on the beach. It seemed to be the same foot. What wondrous, how was that?
The foot king put his hand on Rik-s shoulder and said, "You are surprised, are you?"
Rik nodded.
"I got to the beach once a boy who had seen only three toes. He could just walk in his strange foot. "
"Because you thought of it back here, you see him suddenly standing between all the other feet. Look, there's your own feet and René. "
Rick smiled a little shyly.
"We called you before the foot king. Are you really more of a sorcerer? "
"No, I am not a magician. I can just see what people think, what has scared them, makes them very happy or sad. To see them here plot¬se¬ling for itself as an image. Then they experience the terror which joy or sadness very real. It is you who has ever seen or have seen it and it shows here. "
"But you think all people who come here on their feet?"
"No, it is you who enjoy watching the beautiful feet of your companion and think about it often. Most people do not often at their feet. Why should they, and if they do then it is often too late. Only when their feet protesting against the neglect waar¬onder they have often suffered, thinking they are forced. Usually they forget that they have feet. They often forget how valuable they really are. "
Rik nodded and thought about the maid who went out often at their house her shoes and walked on her bare feet. Her toes were crooked against each other and the bright red painted nails seemed to jostle each other. She had on each foot a large thick knuckle they sometimes rubbed with a painful face. The foot king laughed and pointed to the showcase. Rik glanced only briefly at. He found it an unpleasant face.
"Yes, they sometimes call their feet their subjects. If they believe they treat their citizens badly shameful! They push their feet into shoes with pointed and too narrow noses. And they let their children walk too long on shoes where they are grown. Yes indeed, they still had to know better ....
Toon Huson
Jewellery is my laboratory
Ruudt Peters is a Dutch artist, one of the leading lights of the new avant-garde artistic movements active in the nineteen-seventies. His art, intense, continuous and extremely wide-ranging, also includes teaching and promotion of his own work through numerous exhibitions and publications. After an initial brief period dedicated to sculpture, he embraced jewellery once and for all. He never works the general line of tradition, but is always the artificer of breaks with tradition in his use of new materials and in creating unpredictable forms, actively participating in the debate about the place of jewellery in the context of the Fine Arts and about the role of the artist itself.
He ploughs a specific path, demanding of himself strict rigour, steering him in the direction of an investigation into the alchemic principles which transform matter and fundamental themes such as the unconscious, intuition, spiritual inclinations, sexuality, and knowledge that becomes substance through creative strength. As the result of an inclination which has its roots in his land, he is always open to unknown realities whose cultural spurs and stimuli he perceives and investigates, making them his own in order to be able to translate them in his works. Art is seen as a powerful means of communication which is capable of calling into question every stereotype that lies dormant in the existential and cultural habits of society.
Certainly his works appeal because of the echoes which they emanate, leaving the viewer in suspense because of the difficulty of an understanding which demands a guide, and are sometimes vexing because of the intense emotional involvement which burrows down to touch people’s deepest identities.
It should be said that his work is never superficially provocative, as he clearly explains in an interview which he gave to Susan Cummins, an active gallery manager based in San Francisco and member of the Art Jewelry Forum, in which he introduces the term bezieling , an untranslatable Dutch word which means “putting the soul into something”, a combination of afflatus, sensitivity, a sort of yeast for the spirit. Indeed, for the artist, the work of art, the expression of his intuition and his power of imagination, must possess a quid which transcends matter and captures the viewer. The artist does not hold back: he demands a high level of concentration of himself (“to bring matter to life you have to make sure that all your energy, love, dedication and spirituality go into the piece”), and demands of the viewer or rather the wearer of his jewellery an intense communion with the artist, that is a unique participation which makes him capable of knowing reality through his eyes.
He shares with the young Dutch jewellery artists of the 1970s, such as Onno Boekhoudt, Marion Herbst, Gijs Bakke, Emmy van Leersum, Paul Derrek Francoise van den Bosch and Karel Niehorster, an open break with the tradition of precious, decorative bourgeois jewellery. They are committed to a minimalist approach which is essential in gesture and conceptual in meaning, introducing a new relationship between jewellery and the body.
During those years, his creations were simple geometric shapes defined by straight lines on the flat surface which gradually develop, more complex, into neat architectural volumes, jutting out as a sort of extension to the volume of the body. The materials used are poor metals compared with the traditional ones, decorations and precious gemstones do not appear. They open the eyes to a new concept of beauty.
During the following decades he set out on his own artistic pathway, along which he committed himself to probing the alchemic processes of matter to give shape to families of objects such as Ouroboros (1994), Lapis (1997), Albedo (1998), Pneuma (2000), Iosis (2002), Azoth (2004) and Sefiroth (2006), in which each member has its own name with mythological, spiritual and symbolic reference.
Ouroboros includes a series of between-finger rings which refer to the ancient alchemic principle of change according to which “the one is all”. They disorientate the viewer with the uniqueness of their form, which shapes their use. The extremities of this work, which is crafted from silver and fragments of quartz, obsidian, hematite and other minerals, burst out from each other, an exploded, magmatic matter, broken down and then collected in a controlled manner which, locked between the fingers, rests on the palm of the hand, as if gathering the energies given off by those fragmented, recomposed and still-shining stones.
In Lapis, he invents stone pearls, non-existent in nature, made once again from ground minerals such as jade, onyx, tourmaline, malachite, rock crystal, lapis lazuli and others and recombined into a new aggregation. A piano wire joins them into a series of necklaces and bracelets along which a vibration appears to run and gather.
His ceaseless inquiry into the changeable characteristics of materials produces other forms, such as the bulbs split in two which show their inner nature and form part of the series entitled Josis, a term that indicates the luminous quality of the colour red. Synthetic resins are melted and deposited in layers on the outside and inside of a sometimes-silver core. The splendid red of the outermost layer is striking, recalling the reddish hue of the dawn, a symbol of a new beginning which the artist, enraptured, was able to capture during a stay in Asia.
The term sefiroth refers to the world of the kabbalah, in which the Jewish mystic tradition finds its roots, a philosophy of life which invites one to enter the labyrinth of the soul, exploring the emotions. Through his works, the artist offers a complex meditative experience to enter into contact with cosmic energy. The journey is translated graphically into a geometric tree structure onto which the sefiroths or spheres are grafted, each one corresponding to the properties attributed to God, understood as cosmic energy. Each brooch takes up this graphical aspect and becomes part of a magical system which allows access to the meaning of the spheres which the title of the work reveals to the uninitiated.
He began to explore the sphere of female intuition only to find it in male attitudes too. That he is able to give form to it is undeniable. In the series entitled Anima (2010), we find fragile, delicate brooches, in silver, aluminium and gold, which develop in a three-dimensional manner with a free structure consisting of soft, fluid lines. They are the result of a new, similarly intuitive experience, which liberates matter, melted wax poured into water, gently stirred by the hand, billowing, solidifies into its own pattern in unpredictable forms. What stems from this is an unknown object which seems to be a solid rendering of the unconscious elicited in previous years by the practice of drawing with closed eyes with the aim of making thought freer so as to disconnect from reason and arrive more rapidly at the subconscious.
Until this point in the artist’s development, this intense exploration of matter and of his own capacity for manipulating it translated into formally abstract works. From this point onwards, figurative works make their appearance, in which the reproduction of the human body forms the core for new examples of technical experimentation and existential reflections.
He constructed a series of necklaces from which bundled objects in wood, tin and glass hang, in the form of a phallus or Lingam (2009) represented in a realistic manner. Determinedly and explicitly, after a journey to India, he tackles the theme of sexuality, a focal point of human behaviour, and expresses himself by challenging the conventions of western culture. While in the West a titillating – not to say, perverse, repugnant – view of sexuality prevails, in the east, Hindu and Buddhist cultures the lingam is the symbol of fertility of which Shiva is the protecting divinity that presides over the creating force. It is an object of worship and devotion, made in stone and glass – never terracotta – which turns up wherever people lead their daily lives. It is, moreover, a cult which was part of western culture, from ancient times through to the classical and Christian worlds, with copies in terracotta or metal resembling the original placed in sacred places as propitiators of a healthy, fertile sexuality. The series entitled Corpus (2011) marks the appearance of brooches with fully rounded forms which initially seem difficult to decipher. The title that accompanies them offers a guide to understanding them and memory helps to bring to the surface a figure that has been constantly depicted and has remained essentially unchanged in the Christian iconographic tradition: the body of Christ on the cross. It reimagines the subject several times; only parts of the body are represented, sometimes duplicated and set beside one another. In them, the shaping is partially flattened to slip with a cutting edge into ample, flowing volumes, treated in the classical manner. Is it to be interpreted as an incursion through the body into Christian spirituality? Is it a reimaging of beauty? These are just some of the many questions that surface when approaching the works of this artist.
During his journey to China in 2012, after an initial sense of disorientation, he sought to identify the link and the diversity between the two cultures, western and eastern, and it was in alchemy itself that he found the ‘bridge’: in the West the alchemic tradition relates to the material aspect, while in China it is oriented towards the inner self and the life force. He discovered the Qi, which is the energy of life, according to which it is well-being and the relationship between body and mind in real life that are important, in which alchemy becomes a blend of Taoism, of medicinal herbs, of acupuncture and tai chi.
During his stay his artistic activity was intense. He began drawing blind once more, on large stone surfaces, shaped brooches and pendants in silver and almost-transparent, laser-cut agate, designed and in part made porcelain figures entitled Cun Zai, which means ‘becomebe’, establishing a collaboration with Chinese ceramic workers and stone cutters which enabled him to complete the works on his return to Amsterdam.
He was profoundly affected by the terracotta army of the Jing Di Empire, with the bodies of the soldiers amassed one on top of another, stripped of their garments, their weapons corroded by time. He replaced it with one of his own. The half-height soldiers line up naked with the palm of their hands facing forwards in white porcelain with the meridians of acupuncture drawn on their body and each one with a sign in steel, in horsehair on in glass representing affection, grief, anxiety, all of the feelings that distinguish each one in the mass, a work with ninety-nine human figures that have the Qi as their point of reference.
Those spiritual characteristics that he found exemplified in the Jewish kabbalah, those strands of energy that pass through men originating from the Qi of Chinese culture, find their source in man’s connection between the earth and sky which is formed through the feet. With an unexpected change of direction, the artist lowers his gaze onto the ground to the feet, those ‘contrivances’ that enable the body to remain upright, to walk, to put down roots. They receive little attention, and yet they are essential in guiding us through ‘the mysteries of existence’. Terram (2015) is the title of the artist’s very recent series of works modelled upon his feet.
Luisa Bazzanella
Magic from the ground, 2015
A Retrospective Exhibition of Ruudt Peters
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, President’s Gallery, Boston, USA
May 22–July 31, 2015
Born in 1950 in in the Netherlands, Ruudt Peters is lauded as a prominent and provocative figure in the contemporary jewelry world. He tends to translate big ideas into beautifully crafted jewelry and, through his exhibition design, creates challenging experiences for his viewership. As a conceptual jeweler, Peters investigates ideas through the creation of series of work in various materials, works that explore concepts such as the micro and macro, change, the body, time and continuity, male and female energy, and religion. Individual pieces investigate a facet of these concepts, and are cohesively brought together through a specific narrative. He organizes and displays the resulting series using the exhibition as a point of transition before the work leaves the gallery and goes into a private or public collection.
Ground extends Peters’s track record of creating bold jewelry displays in relation to the exhibition space. The exhibition at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, organized by Heather White van Stolk, is a visual autobiography of Peters’s work beginning in the 1970s. Installed in the President’s Gallery, the vestibule to the president’s office, the exhibition expands from an entranceway into a larger space that connects various administrative offices.
Peters gave the keynote speech at the Society of North American Goldsmiths conference “Looking Back, Forging Forward” on May 21, in which he presented images of his work and inspiration in rapid succession, relaying to the audience just how quickly his mind moves and the many connections he makes through exploration and travel. This exhibition, organized in conjunction with the conference, parallels his ideas as each vitrine represents jewelry series he has created in the past: Passio, Iosis, Lapis, Oroboros, Lingam, and Qi, to name a few.
As viewers enter the gallery, they confront the exhibition title, introduction text, and first vitrine on the ground before them. Following the sequence of vitrines installed directly on the gallery’s floor, one can see the various thematic concepts that Peters has explored over the course of his career. Each case’s surface features his blind drawings of the human form, quick dynamic sketches that Peters made with his eyes closed, rendered on Plexiglas with jewelry placed upon them. Other than a short introduction, there are no formal labels in the exhibition. The titles and dates of the pieces are handwritten on the Plexiglas below each work, and viewers are left to look at each object and form their own interpretations.
The drawings provide a visual bridge teeming with energy and connecting the jewelry with the earth. They also unify the visually diverse series, created over 40 years in a variety of materials and techniques. As most of the drawings are of the human form, they give us a sense of placement and the relationship of jewelry and the body.
The title panel directs visitors to access a YouTube link of Peters expounding on Ground. In the video, Peters explains using the concept of “ground” to connect himself to the earth’s energy. The video is a helpful key to Peters’s work. As he has made clear through writings and various presentations, Peters identifies the ground as a gateway, and asks his viewers to be aware of their own bodies and energies interacting with the jewelry as it is set out on the floor. Throughout the exhibition we see small male figures rendered in porcelain. These little figures stand beside the vitrines, giving the viewer another object to explore—and like the low vitrines, they require us to kneel down to examine the meridian points mapped on their bodies. Each man has a different part of his body modified—one has glazed feet; another has a bubble coming out of his mouth; a third, little pins along the spine at the chakra points; and a fourth, the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life’s nodes marked with cones.
The Plexiglas cases are almost like coffins, and the porcelain effigies contribute to the feeling of walking into a quiet crypt. However, once we do make that pilgrimage to the eleventh-floor gallery, we are rewarded with an intriguing exhibition of masterfully created jewelry. Since the jewelry is covered, our only opportunity to “touch” the work is not with our hands but with our bodies as we kneel on the ground. The ground, then, becomes a conductor between our body and the work, which is only accessible when we physically and deliberately move close to the objects. This is in line with Peters’s exhibition history, which requires his visitors to perform certain actions and position themselves in certain ways in order to interact with the work. Genuflection is meditative, and encourages us to contemplate the pieces presented with the attention and at the speed usually reserved for devotion or spiritual exercises. In grounding ourselves before each vitrine, we are anchored before it and encouraged to think through each piece and series.
The unconventional installation is engaging, yet it does diminish the accessibility to the jewelry itself. Those visitors not able or willing to lower themselves to the ground will miss the exhibition almost completely. An important element in Peters’s practice is about magic. In this gallery I am reminded that magic is often unseen and unknown: By distancing the vitrines and jewelry from the viewers, the mystery is either amplified if the viewer is receptive, or lost if that person refuses to open up to the nuances of the work and display. I am particularly drawn to the Sephiroth series. The brooches from the Sephiroth series are representations of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. The nodes in the brooches’ lattice structure—spheres formed in silver and glass—represent “emanations,” or revelations of the divine to man. This series pays a large tribute to mysticism (just as Corpus does to Christianity), and begs to be used as magical amulets. I imagine it could be similarly transformative to wear and embody the male energy promised by the huge phallus pendants in the Lingam series. The body activates the jewelry, but we are denied the immediacy of touch in this installation. As suggested above, that denial is part of the mystery. Again, the viewer has the opportunity to accept this or feel frustrated at being denied such powerful amulets. It is dependent on how we read the vitrines—as a veil between the sacred and the profane, or as an expected security measure.
For those familiar with Peters’s oeuvre but not with his shows, Ground is an opportunity to experience his jewelry within his curated environments. For those new to his work—perhaps the young metalsmiths at MassArt or the administration—the exhibition provides a launching point to examine art jewelry in a manner rarely employed in traditional gallery spaces. We are treated to a corporal experience that asks us to move our bodies closer to the ground to see the work, marrying our physical bodies with Peters’s conceptual objects.
Magic from the Ground, Ruudt Peters at MassArt by Luiza deCamargo
(This text has originally been commissioned by Art Jewelry Forum and is reproduced with permission)
Dusza, 2015
Ruudt Peters playing priest 1958
Photo: Willy van den Burg-Peters
There is an image that shows you as a kid, wearing a catholic priests outfit and reenacting a church scene. I find that very unusuaI, I know nobody who did that.
I stitched the chasuble myself as you can see, it's very badly done. I was eight years old, I think, and I was fascinated and very serious. I made this wafer, circular bread, and gave it to my friends and they had to be VERY serious, otherwise I would slap them in the face. Be silent and so on, so it was a very serious play. But I think this play, and also the catholic upbringing, made me want to have a meaning and a background within pieces, in what I am doing. Without meaning there is no need. Why should you add a piece of jewellery to this world without any meaning? There is already so much shit in the world.
Would you say you are still religious?
I am religious. I feel that I have these rituals and I feel that I have this mystery, this feeling of mystery. I don’t like the church as an institution, that is not where it comes from. But there is something more than what we can see, that’s a belief, that’s what I believe in.
How do you see your work in relation to religion?
I think that if Geist* and the soul are part of a piece it has a lot to do with religion, with what is inside of you.
Some series have a religious starting point. It may not be so visible in the end. But it's about Buddhism or Judaism some people say hey, now you tick off another religion but that is not the way it goes. It's maybe more alchemy and very dark, strange mystery of things. And in that whole path of searching I found some things, they pop up. And when they do I think well, I have to do something with it - or not.
I don’t want to be a fundamental Christian gay jewellery maker. When I made corpus, I had a huge fear that people would abandon me because of the fact that I made this crucifix. I had a big fear. I thought oh my God, what am I doing here. Because honestly, you can talk about Hinduism, Judaism, Kabbalah, blah blah blah, alchemy, but when it comes to your own religion, when it comes very close, CHRRR, they can fire you directly, because they can knock you down. And I was like,.. that was very very,.. I found it dangerous. And on the other hand I wanted to do it because it was something that was already there for years. It's not only that I am talking about Christianity. I am talking about religion in general when I am doing something.
Do you than feel like the pieces you make are falling into a void? Religion doesn’t seem to play such a big role in our society any more.
There are two parts. One part is when I make a strictly religious connotation in my works, than it is yes. But the second I make the pieces more universal or try to make them more universal, that there is an emotional aspect to it, it's readable by a bigger group of people. But maybe they don’t read into it what I am talking about. And that’s no problem for me. But the fact is that all these different religions are a certain kind of anthropological mirror of society.
But you are right that I see that there is – and I don’t want to say that out of my perspective of being a little bit older - but for me it is a pity that our society lost a lot of knowledge and spirituality by having the religion removed. So I think in one way it is true and the other way I see that usually on Sunday morning the church celebrates its mass at 11 and now the museum is opening at the same time and all the people run to the museums to get their transcendental input. Because they want something! But don’t call it God or whatever because that is too much. And another thing is that I realize, I am not going to church every week, but sometimes when I am going I think wow, this is fantastic, I am sitting there an hour and I am silent, I can reflect on my things. And what is it? It's great to have one hour per week for reflection on your life. And now we are running, rushing, sunday markets are open, shops, blah blah blah.
A meaning! That’s what people are searching for, they are really searching for what is my life? Why am I here? Is it only for eating, drinking, working, sex? That’s it? No, I think there is something more. And that more is maybe soul.
How would you describe the soul in general?
In general it's the unsaid thing. I can look at a thing and I can give a description of the piece, but than what is underneath, what is not said, you can not give that a mark, you can’t say hey, this is what it is - so the nonverbal inner part of a thing that speaks to you but what you can not describe - that’s where things start. That’s very difficult, because it is very different for a lot of people, what a soul is for you is for someone else no soul. Could be.
So for you it is something that you can’t intelligibly recognize but rather emotionally experience?
Yes. That it is an emotional experience and that it touches me. By touching I mean the way that I touch you and by touching you can become touched or the piece can guide you to certain kinds of thoughts - or different ones, that there are more layers, layers are very important. When the piece is only tack tack tack tack, than it's also not universal in that case, cause than only one group of people can follow that thought. Than it becomes something else. I am very interested in someone else telling me about a totally unexpected part of my work.
If we are talking about the soul of a certain piece, would you say you give a part of your soul into it or does it get its soul independently? You are the maker, you leave an imprint.
Sure, I leave an imprint, but for me it's too heavy and too loaded to say that I give a soul into a piece. It is like maybe you blow in it but it's not that it starts a life. It's like God who is giving life to Adam.
I am also not working on getting a soul in a piece, never. I don’t even think about it, maybe afterwards, sometimes after years I realize maybe that one, wow, has got it. So, ok, I think you can make work and you can design. And than it's like a package, a nice package, the outer form. But I am less interested in the outer form, I am more interested in what is inside.
I come from a family of hairdressers and so they were only concerned with beauty. They say well, if my hair is beautiful than its perfect, than everything is perfect. And I thought: shit. On the strange subject of bezieling** , what is it than? I don’t know. I honestly can't give an answer. I can only see when it is there. But when you want to get it in there, it never works. I think you can only create the conditions for making new work.
You can’t force it, there is no recipe?
No no. Well, the only recipe is working. The only recipe is go on, go on, go on and maybe there will be a kind of soul. Or there pops up a soul or there is a soul but to put a lot of energy or labour into a piece doesn’t give any result. It is good that you do it, but it's not the fact that when you put a lot of energy into it you get a soul out of it. That doesn’t give that result. It's something else. And what that else is, it is being aware, waking up, I am calling it intelligent-stupid. Because than you do things that you should not do and sometimes things happen, because of the fact that you are stupid. But you don’t have to do no procedures. You don’t follow the rules, afterwards you are surprised by your own hands and you think oh my God what have I done. The moment when I thought that this “Dusza”, this soul, is a fantastic subject, but shit, to give your exhibition the name soul, puh! puh! puh! This is heavy, because now I have to make a selection of what is a soul and what is not a soul. Pfewww. Good.u
*German word for spirit
** bezieling is a dutch word, which roughly translated means “to inspire“ or “inspirit“. Ziel means “soul”, and beziel means to “infuse” or “animate”, but bezieling is a verb that instils a god-like power, to bestow a soul onto an object. It is a fantastic Dutch word.
Benedikt Fischer
From the catalogue Dusza Silver festival Legnica Poland 2015