Sibyl Heijnen Collected Scenery
20 januari 2022
Sibyl Heijnen - Collected scenery
Please visit my website at http://www.sibylheijnen.com
Spatial drawings is a term I use for my works that occupy a wall, a floor, or as we see here an entire pond. Strictly speaking, such works are installations rather than drawings: three dimensional compositions using a whole pallet of materials.
I make an in-depth study of the place, the light the environment perhaps the history. What belongs here? Both technical and intuitive1 I try to ‘taste” the space, the atmosphere, ambiance, dimensions.
I really try to embrace and to feel the total.
After that I can determine how to enrich the space.
What will be outlined, what do I want to add? Next step is to make a rough sketch and to explore which material is the best fitting for my concept.
Turning waste into an artwork and no added waste in the end, as this is a temporally project, is an important theme to me.
Starting with this theme and the concept of sparkles, bringing light in the dark and connecting / bringing together, I have chosen as my main material aluminium drinking cans. Used ones, found and collected.
A light, sparkling, brilliant and colourful material attached to wood recycled from pallets. Drinking cans, easy to deform to give more sparkles and to be seen from many sides.
Even the noise is wonderful to be used. How wonderful it would have been to carry out the plan in which 200 children, Each one of them dragging a rope with two cans attached, walking from different sides and coming together around the pond. Such a pity that this plan had to be cancelled due to COVID19.
In the concept I also wanted to bring together nature and culture. Water and artificial islands.
And growing out of these islands so called fly pines, harvested to preserve the heathland.
Although the ‘islands’ are quietly laying and bobbing in the water it was a technical complex project.
The viewer might concentrate on details, wondering what materials were used and how they were processed.
In the end, what counts is the experience of the work as a whole.
Sibyl Heijnen often works in spaces that have a distinctive history. She does a gustation of the space, sampling and savoring its atmosphere and ambiance, its light, its dimensions (amount of floor space, number of walls, height). Only then does she determine how she will enrich the architectural space. A comparison with drawing arises at that point: she will be making a study sketch, a coherent design for certain spots to be marked, contours to be outlined. In this study and exploration phase ideas arise for the materials the artist plans to use. Sibyl draws from a wealth of materials: textiles, rubber sheets, stretched animal hides, artificial grass – pliable materials, usually, although she has also dusted floors with grains of salt. In her work, she does not follow fixed recipes, and the space in which she works determines her process.
Subsequently, the step from idea to form is taken. For Sibyl Heijnen, the boundaries between drawing, painting, and sculpture are fluent. She covers rubber with gold leaf, she uses lacquer paints using a pen knife – this, for Sibyl, is a form of drawing as well. However, she usually leaves deer hide parchments (deer hides tanned extensively, so they have turned into parchment) intact. With their scalloped contours, their skin patterns, their beautiful colour shifts – Sibyl feels that in the case of deer hides, interventions by a human hand hardly ever constitute improvements.
In the end, what counts is the experience of the work as a whole. The viewer might concentrate on details, wondering what materials were used and how they were processed, taking in the odours of the materials and how the materials absorb the light or reflect it, how they shine or instead seem to withdraw. This abundance of sensory details forms an invitation to enter an unknown world that is lavish with meaning.
