Beauty in Destruction
In my artistic process I find destruction a very useful tool. Sometimes when a project is pretty but kind of stuck, I dismember it to create new tension.
That’s when the scissors come out!
Destroying the familiar prettiness allows me to see the art piece anew, injured and ready to be mended. Suddenly the work process gets exciting again and I find a way forward.
There is a mesmerising beauty in destruction.
I remember when I was an art student in Berlin, we got invited to witness the controlled explosion of a building. Back in these days there was not much awareness of deconstructing and re-using building materials so this old and tired block of offices got blown up. It was spectacular!
One of my fellow students who was a photographer documented the whole event and the pictures turned out to be of award winning quality. Thousands of flying bits of concrete, Steel beams bending like straws, glass panes pulverizing, for a few seconds it was absolute beauty before the building turned into a huge pile of rubble and dust.
I often thought about the unreal beauty of this event and also questioned why these photographs ignited such a fascination with people. My friend Marie would probably say now that’s entropy! The compulsion to destroy something that works smoothly. Entropy is the general trend of the universe towards death and disorder. (Merriam-Webster) Randomness, lack of order, gradual decline into dis-order. Maybe our fascination with this destructive force carries a life confirming question: And what now? It is a fresh start.
From this angle destruction seems like a necessary move to un-stuck life, to break up the old, to get things flowing again, to create dynamism and momentum, to get rid of old crusts and make space for something new.
The cut-paintings in this ongoing series called Beauty in Destruction all go through several rounds of dismemberment and re-formation before they arrive at their final form.
Although they are still pretty, they have been through quite a process and I believe it is his process that gives them something real. A depth that a human soul can relate to. At least my soul relates to it strongly. It is that transformational element we all know, be it from injury, accident or loss, etc. We all go through it, re-form and carry on but as a slightly different versions of ourselves. That’s life. It is containing all of it. Creation, preservation and destruction.