Edith Dekyndt

Often using the simplest of means and with minimal intervention Edith Dekyndt creates art works which engage with common place forces of nature and scientific phenomena. Working in an area of two overlapping territories – physics and aesthetics  – Dekyndt’s methodologies do have something akin to scientific experiments. However she is less in the pursuit of decisive evidence or proving a theorem than opening herself up to unknown outcomes, and to failure as much as success. Similarly, she is less interested in the universal, and cold objective fact, than in how her various explorations can engender a more personal, emotional response.

All the many varied patterns and forms of Mexican Vanities and X Men utilise the same physical phenomenon: capillary action. Silk-like material is stretched over a frame and then laid flat in a shallow tray of ink or other coloured liquid (coffee, wine). Left over night the liquid, of its own accord, seeps up and across the material. The resulting abstract images range from the almost monochrome, to an often occurring simple X, to more complex organic-looking structures. Cosmic gas clouds, bracken, coral are some of the associations they bring to mind, as well as the shadowy, shifting forms of early spirit photography. (A line could be perhaps traced back here to Dekyndt’s earlier and informative interest in accidentally over-exposed photographs as well as her films of the apparitions of Polaroid photographs).

As a corollary to her many ventures and journeys (Dekyndt has travelled widely, often making context specific work) she has developed a body of drawings representing the persistence of time in a single location. Slowly and repetitively, pencil and ink marks are applied to paper or canvas until an area is completely filled. This simple, time consuming, repeated action of the hand transforms the underlying layer of material to create undulations and buckles giving the drawing the appearance of something fluid like a rippling curtain or wavy water. Meditative, and in some ways melancholic too, they are like monuments to the passing of time.

The two blanket pieces Untitled (Golden Blanket L) and Untitled (Silver Blanket L) have had gold and silver leaf applied to their surface. It’s an unexpected alliance of materials, almost unnatural, with the softness and wooly texture of the blanket offering a strange contrast to the smooth, lustrous metal. The blankets, symbolic of warmth, comfort and safety are here raised up like abstract heraldic flags, quiet paeans for private gods.

Edith Dekyndt (b. Ypres, 1960) lives and works in Belgium. Studied at E.S.A.P.V.E., Mons, Belgium. Dekyndt has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions including VidalCuglietta (Brussels), Karin Guenther (Hamburg), Meyer Riegger (Karlsruhe), Gregor Podnar (Ljubljana), Fri Art – Centre d’Art de Fribourg (Switzerland) and Witte de With (Rotterdam).