#20: Of Mud and Lotus

Here these are some more recent works, where I'm looking for a kind of abstraction in photography mixed with paint and ink. So then I made this body of work called of "Of Mud and Lotus".

"Of Mud and Lotus" was really kind of the opposite from the shadow from "Umbra". And if you could, in a way, perceive "Umbra", as a more abstract, more masculine, a darker side of my personality. And then this one, this body of work, the of monologues is kind of the opposite. It's really about fertility and womanhood, femininity. I think by then, I also had become a mom. This has somehow influenced my work as well. As you see, a lot of mushrooms popping up, just playing with collage and paint.

And for instance, this one, this was actually a little test on like-postcard formats. I painted it and then I scanned it and enlarged it. So you can still see, for instance, here, you can see the my thumbfingerprintsenlarged. I also did this book of my lotus with a Japanese designer. You see all the threads coming loose from the cover of the book.

And as you can see here, I was also starting to work with collage techniques much more. The funny thing was is that at the time, I already used a lot of collage techniques and paint on my fashion work, but not at all in my art.

Somehow, there is this time before and after "Umbra". And I think before "Umbra", somehow I felt that my art should stay pure. I was always shooting analog with the Mamiya 7. And I didn't do any interventions in my art. All the prints were analog, et cetera.

And then in fashion, at the time, digital photography came up. So I was experimenting with only using the digital for the fashion work and not at all for the artwork. But then after several years, I felt that also the technical aspects of the digital cameras had improved. I started shooting all my work digitally. And somehow, especially in my editorial work for fashion. I use a lot of these kind of techniques, photoshop but also handmade cut out collage and painting in of modern lotus. I decided to also implement these kind of techniques into my personal work into my art.