With elementary materials – wood, paper, clay, tape, paint – artist Fleur van Dodewaard creates ephemeral compositions that play with the possibilities of photography, sculpture, and painting. Situated at those intersections, her work uses photography to achieve the final result. ‘THE FOLD’ presents ten years of practice, reshaped according to the principles of book production: folding, cutting, binding. Like a “making-of” documentary, the book displays its own structural mechanisms, revealing both artistic premises and systems of construction in an exploration of the creative process. An upside-down section in the middle suggests another way to parse its contents.
The fact that this dialogue between the work of Fleur and designer Mathias Kreutzer (Our Polite Society), publisher of Free Pony Press, can exist so successfully, lies in the essential questioning of their subject in creating a reality of their own. Examples of Fleur’s photo series clearly demonstrate this.
The Kelly Pages are photographs taken of a book with paintings by Ellsworth Kelly. The work is embedded in the act of looking. It is about capturing that single, fleeting moment in time and space, where the page is turned and a new ‘Shaped Canvas’ is created.
Biscuits is a series of 15 photographs. Each of them shows a sculptural assemblage of a yet unfinished porcelain vase, or vase-like shape, (‘biscuit’) and multiple small and colorful found objects of various materials.
For 131 Variations series (2013), she photographed the ribs of a salmon-pink wooden cube in different compositions. The work was a remake of Sol LeWitt’s 122 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes.
author: Fleur van Dodewaard
designer: Matthias Kreutzer
©2022 Free Pony Press
softbound, edition of 500, 312 pages, ills colour, 21 x 30 cm, French/English
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THE FOLD was part of Test Press Books|2| / 2022