Workshop 'becoming Lamb', Veerle Melis & Liza Prins
21 May 2022, 13.00-17.00
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“The lamb is not innocent..It knows how to read the feeling of the form of what is each other altogether, the fears and pleasures and neutralities of each other, the everything of what is expressed in a bleat or twitch when the lamb is with each other and the next one and there is never one lamb alone” - Anne Boyer
Boyer's lamb, which knows in collectivity, is the starting point for the project Becoming Lamb by Liza Prins and Veerle Melis. With the knitted jumper at the centre as a materialisation of embodied social relations and subjectivity, they explore the dynamics of collectivity through community-forming textile gestures. During the workshop on 21 May, they invite the public to participate in taking apart jumpers to make experimental non-functional and multi-personal ones. By collectively exchanging skills and knowledge around textile techniques while working on the jumpers, they explore realities that are more about interconnectedness than about the individual and try to rethink current neoliberal dynamics of hyper-productivity that make our peers burn out prematurely. Alternated with collective stretching exercises and moments of reciting the poem, the making of these sweaters will be an exercise for becoming lamb (again).
As an artist duo, Liza and Veerle found in each other a shared love of the relationality, domesticity and performative potential of craft practices. Through her practice, Liza aims to revalue subversive material practices that are often coded feminine in performative ways, while Veerle is mainly interested in the magic, bellybutton knowledge-generating insightfulness of engaging with her textile craft processes. Together they are interested in elaborating on and enlarging the beyond-human connections that gather in hand making practices as a vehicle to address their longing for collaborative creation and shared experiences toward a softening of our art environment.
After the first public moment at Hotel Maria Kapel, we will continue this research project during a residency at the Van Gogh House in London.
Veerle Melis (1990, Tilburg) is a self-taught textile artist/craftsperson and is based between Brussels and Tilburg. Taking inspiration from this autodidactic background, her work can be seen as an ongoing meditation on the ingenuity of (human) nature and on what it means to create. Performing countless repetitive gestures, she learns from her materials and the environment in which she works. These manual gestures, the making of a sketch, material-specific characteristics, conceptual ideas, family histories, slips of materials and attention, little mistakes and other unforeseeable events bring forth inspiration and insights that find their place in her works. Being attentive to these insightful moments leads to a belly-button understanding of and a humble stance towards creative phenomena and the world’s different unfoldings. Traces of these insightful moments can be found back in small technical details as well as in the thematics of her works.
Liza Prins is an artist, researcher and writer based in Amsterdam. She was trained as an artist at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated with a master’s degree in Artistic Research from the University of Amsterdam, where her thesis focused on the intersections between feminist, new materialist methodology and performative practices. Her current work focuses on reinterpreting and revaluing forms of labour that are often coded as feminine. Through collaborative and personal writings and performative works, she recalls those practices that have been forced to the margins of society because, in the eye of an aggressive capitalist ideology, they are not part of progress or even a danger to it. In recent works, her focus has been shifting slightly from the actual labour to the voice-based practices that were developed in interaction with work, not seldomly as a form of resistance. Her work has been exhibited in Nieuw Dakota in Amsterdam, Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn, Kunsthuis SYB and The Roger Brown house in Chicago among other places. Her writings have been published in academic and less-academic journals, books and zines, like Metropolis M, Snaky Zine, ANTENNAE and Platform Taak. In 2019 she received a young talent grant from the Mondriaan Fund.
Made possible with help of: Josine de Bruyn Kops Fonds