A CORNER OF HOME 

Jeroen De Wandel

Published 29 May, 2020 

In the days that have passed and the days that are to come, we'll all be spending more time indoors. A Corner of Home collects photographic studies and new works made by artists in their immediate environments; small snapshots of the impulse to create.

Edited by Trine Stephensen and Joanna Cresswell 

1. Where are you living at the moment and how has that environment shaped you creatively? Can you tell us about a favourite detail of this place and why?

I’m living at home, in a suburb of Ghent, Sint-Amandsberg, in Belgium. I wasn’t born in Ghent but in a small village 50km away, called Ronse. It’s very beautiful but there’s not so much to do there except perhaps for walks in nature. Like so many others, I studied in Ghent and kept on hanging around because of friends and family, but I do like to travel a lot – abroad, but also within the parameters of this strange country. Brussels is my favourite town because of the more experimental cultural scene in arts and music.  

I have my studio in Ghent, at home. This studio is located at the top of my house. It’s a room with a lot of natural light, looking over the big trees in neighbouring gardens, which is important to me as the sound of trees and birds have a calming effect and help to get in ‘the zone’ to experiment and to create stuff. I have my record player in a corner, as music is also a good way to stimulate creation, and lately I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff by Eliane Radigue, Swans and Miles Davis in his more experimental period. What I hear definitely finds its way into my output. Once I was told that an exhibition of mine looked like a carefully assembled composition with multiple layers; it was the biggest compliment I ever had. 

2. How have you looked at the materials of home differently in the past weeks? Are there parts of it that have revealed themselves to you in new ways?

My current ongoing project, Amygdala, is about memory, and how our brains add extra layers every time we recall something. Some memories are strongly anchored in our memory; others become coloured over time. Fragments from the past lose their context and their connection with the present gradually fades. It makes us think about how we deal with facts and manipulation; a theme that is very relevant today. 

Due to Covid and the lockdown, all of my exhibitions have been cancelled or postponed, so I’ve suddenly had a lot of time to create something new – but without leaving the house. I found out I have a lot of stuff like found objects and memorabilia – which in Dutch we call ‘brol’ –  laying around in my studio. I asked myself what all those things were doing there. Why did I not throw them away? I discovered that all of these things I had collected unconsciously (stones, dead insects, old newspapers found behind the wall of our house when renovating, my brother’s old 70s pencil sharpener that somehow ended up there…) must have some kind of 'memory value’ to me; they all reminded me of some beautiful moments or periods.

3. Tell us about how you’ve been using photography lately? What are you making or putting in front of the lens?

Normally I work with collages, digitally as well as analogue, creating new composed images, zines where the pictures interact with each other, or huge billboards for public spaces. I don’t set scenes for my regular way of picture taking, I’m not really a fan of controlling every little detail, my pictures are more the result of a constant searching, in a non-intrusive way. With collages, the act of ‘setting the scene’ follows later on.

By discovering the value of all those little objects, I did start to build ‘scenes’ with them. I only wanted to use natural daylight, of which we had a lot during this Covid period as it was extremely nice weather, and no tripod. Those scenes resulted in abstracted, strange stills – nature morte brought together in a new composition, creating a new layer to the memory trace this object already had.

Thank you Jeroen

x

@jeroen_de_wandel