In 2012 I started studying Fine Art (autonoom beeldende kunst) here in the Netherlands. I feel like every day in class we were tormented with this question, ‘what’s your fascination?’ At the beginning, I was not into it: who cares what I’m fascinated by, and stop bothering me. I just want to paint, damn it.
Now five years later, in a totally different program, a different school, I’m actually still reaping the benefits of that question. The fascinations that I eventually uncovered in art school are the driving motivations for what I’m doing now, they influence my tastes, hobbies…what I’m drawn to. It’s actually been super useful!
The process of discovering all this was pretty annoying at first. But I’m learning that I have a hard time participating in something unless I know why I’m doing it. . 😉
So, it all started in one class called ‘Lab’. This guy named Herman was our teacher…all of my art school teachers were so delightfully weird. Some of I really liked some I really didn’t. Herman just plain freaked me out. He would look me deep in the eyes and ask, ‘wat is jouw fascinatie???!!!’ or worse ‘what sets you on FIRE??” I usually didn’t have an ready answer for poor Herman.
In order to get to the bottom of our fascinations, we were told to start following them. This meant collecting and documenting what caught our eye, what we found interesting. anything. The idea was, that behind this collection, insights or patterns would emerge that would lead to a new discovery about yourself, and new inspiration to make work.
Eventually I got the hang of this process and started to believe in it. The hardest part is between the collecting and discovering. you’re kind of in the dark…hoping this fascination is leading you somewhere. It’s the hardest for me to have patience with this process. I can panic if I feel like I’m not getting anywhere or I’m taking too long to get results. This cool thing is, once I give myself the space and time to collect and explore, something new always springs up! Well, it’s not exactly new…it’s more like I discover more about what was there all along.
So anyhoo, here I am somewhere in this process again, letting my fascination lead me. Wow, that sounds so…the only word I can think if is: sweverig. That’s a word the Dutch use to describe abstract, weird, fringy things 😉 The literal meaning is ‘floaty’. But hey, sometimes it’s nice to be floaty.
I remember as a little girl being fascinated by this picture. It’s from my mom’s cookbook, which is full of beautifully weird and surreal food images and old-school illustrations. I was also captivated by the description: ‘a thing of beauty…and mystery’. It’s such an odd thing to say about a dessert…but, it did make me totally want to bake the thing and find out what the mystery was.
It’s memories like this one that are motivating me for my project now. There’s something about the past, and watching my mom bake, and learning to bake myself that I’m looking to find again and somehow re-create or express in a new way through this project.
By the way, I am now the proud owner of, not my mom’s cookbook, but my grandmother’s, which is the first edition of the same book 🙂