Julie Kern Donck

From January to June of 2021, I spent my time in the Artwell Residencies in the Zuidoost suburb of Amsterdam. The area is notorious for its international company headquarters, and we were located in the former building of the Honeywell company, still evolving across its old carpets and corporate decor, surrendered to abandoned parking lots where bunnies run in the night as well as hardware stores.

These two little memorials are made of the carpets and things that I did find around, or that have been given to me, as well as parts of my own body and a master drawing I used during the residency.

The choice of both organic, mnemonic and artificial materials stands as a sampled collection before the area is entirely rebuilt, following an accelerated process of gentrification in the neighbourhood. The organic elements in particular are confronted by plastic and industrial objects, as a memento mori of constant change.

Global Eden is an ongoing collection of short poetic texts written in 3 languages: English, Brazilian Portuguese, and French. With no primary language of redaction, its privileged means of conveying meaning is through the use of imagery and metaphors, while letting syntactic contamination influence momentums and suspensions. The text is currently divided into two parts made from small verses with individual titles.

The themes gravitate around displacement, love, solace, connection, and violence.

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This series has been my main area of exploration this year. Lacking the technical means usually necessary to a printmaker, I developed collections of drawings and images that I magnify and reproduce through punching patterns. The technique has been used for centuries to produce series of near-identical paintings manually and is notorious for having been used in Flanders and The Netherlands, where I am currently in an art residency. Typically, a dozen reproduced paintings would be executed by apprentices and a single one by the master.

For this series, I combined the punching technique with encaustic painting, also a very old medium, that allows me to erase and redraw or repaint a pattern indefinitely. It is possible to paint, melt or carve the surface to merge or superimpose images onto each other, creating effects of density, loss, superimposition. I also use iridescent pigments generally used for nail art, which, together with the wax, gives a certain magical strangeness to the final result.

In terms of images, I chose to pick and collect mixtures of my own sketches and images in a very eclectic way. Things that feel familiar, for personal reasons or simply because they have been hanging around in globalized culture.

Trauma can be defined as a memory that keeps repeating itself, a ghost that doesn’t cease to haunt its sufferer with fixated yet confused successions of memories, images, sounds and feelings. The repetitiousness of the memory loops does exhaust the sufferer, yet they are incapable of stopping that obsessive carousel. Figures of the past might lose their sharpness, they keep appearing under diverse forms in diverse moments.

As in memory, this process of repeating the same patterns over and over through the whole series of works has some familiarity with the traumatic circle in its strenuousness. If there are variations in the execution, the main patterns do remain the same, yet they might be obfuscated by novelties or different ways of being superimposed.

The work is also deliberately marked by the absence of hierarchy or of any clear logical association in the images it carries, be it in date, scale, object represented, or style. This apparent discontinuity is also meant to trigger confusion and attract the viewer to examine the materiality of the pieces more closely and see the density of the details.

A collection of etchings made like notes, unfinished comments in the dark. Narratives develop through the association of things, images and ideas. Drawings are bitten, mistreated by nitric acid, ferric chloride, the varnish has burnt, the plates have been carelessly carried, scratched, abandoned; their attrition is the sign of both their importance and their pointlessness.

A comic book that tells the story of a first person shooter operative faced with telepathic existential threats and a silent transponder.

The title, imagery and quotes play around the notions of past and contemporary empires as well as video games, with appearances of the typical FN Five SeveN gun, the head of the lupa capitolina, a B2-Spirit bomber and quotes from Marcus Aurelius.

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