Bouke de Vries

 

Relevance to my work:

Bouke de Vries created a series of ceramic works based on the image of Chairman Mao’s head covered in different ways by tiny skulls. This is an interesting political statement about Chairman Mao’s reign in China and the many numbers of people who suffered under him. However, it also draws attention through the many tiny skulls to the small part each person plays in the world’s bigger picture. Though I haven’t used things that are within this work, I find the reference to death in this work related to my own.

 

 

"Using the skills he perfected as a ceramics restorer, Bouke de Vries takes broken, discarded ceramic pieces and rethinks them. In his new series of “exploded” artworks, de Vries freezes the most traumatic moment of a pieces’s history. Whether Ming or Meissen, he sees the beauty in their destruction and remakes them into something current and thought-provoking.

 

Instead of reconstructing the object – he deconstructs it, and while others woul hide the imperfections – he emphasises them and moves the object’s story forward by instilling a new value into it. The spaces in between the fragments become an essential part of the structure and the objects sometimes take on a cubist quality where characters and chimeras juxtapose history and modern life, bouncing off both."

 

ALL VISUAL ARTS. (2011).Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures. All Visual Arts: London.