Drawing with iron

An artist who decides at the earliest stage that she is not going to let her freedom be confined by frames and panels creates an interesting dilemma for herself. “Isn’t all art meant to be put up above the couch?” was once the playful provocation of art gallery owner Wanda Reiff, who will present Natascha Waeyen’s work in 2011 on the Margraten Plateau. But what if you have carved in the moral charter of your artistry that your work must always be strong enough to break each barrier, each boundary? Does that mean you declare war to the frame?

When you are into the work of Natascha Waeyen, you will have established that in the past few years, particularly visible to everyone in Germany – especially in Bad Salzhausen (2009) and Herzogenrath (2010) – she gives shape to her study of the play of light and space via installations, often built from aviary wire. In Herzogenrath, she hung wire banners behind the monumental Burg Rode castle, high upon the castle hill. There, Waeyen made very clear what she is looking for: a sharpened look, another perspective, a new experience of the public space or if you wish, the world around you. And that under the motto that it never hurts to see your own environment from a distance: you might make surprising discoveries.

In Bad Salzhausen, where she was invited to a symposium and an exhibition, they surprisingly introduced her as a sculptor. Nevertheless, they explicitly added that Natascha Waeyen in fact creates three-dimensional drawings. It must have pleased her that they recognized the hand of drawing in her installations. A drawer draws, with ink or with iron, that doesn’t matter. Drawing is a constant factor in her life. Her play of lines and rhythms, often in the shape of constrained or self-construed structures in the material, always give the light access and a shadow. It’s just a matter of how you look at it. After all, a landscape also has a rhythm. Not that she thinks of a landscape when she creates, but it does work the other way around: certain rhythms can summon the image of a landscape. Natascha Waeyen speaks of a play with the literal space when it concerns her three-dimensional work. When she speaks about her framed work, she chooses her words more subtly: then, she talks about playing with the imaginary space; in a frame you have to represent the space. These works also originate more and more often in the margin, not rarely from residues when she tries out new shapes, new possibilities. She hardly ever beforehand decides to make a framed work. Often, it takes years before she winds up framing a work.

Playing, by the way, should not be taken too literally; her work originates from endless and patient reflecting, combining and soldering. The artist is happy doing that. What she actually does, is making a study of the space. How can you make the common space differently perceptible by means of artistic interventions? With her transparent wires she has found a way of manipulating the public space; in the small space that seems more difficult. Because when you catch light and space in a frame that confines it, you summon an entirely different reality.

Her work is created in her studio in Maastricht. Already at the art academy she drew with wire. Once, she started working with paint, as many other colleagues, but that brought her too much colour. Colour is too difficult, colour is an obligatory process, colour distracts. It’s not her thing. First, she banned colour to the background. She painted it blue, for example, and stretched a wire drawing over it, creating her own rhythms by playing with different measures of the square. Or she painted the wire and soldered a kind of little houses of iron gauze on it, still against a blue background. Or she painted right through her iron drawings. She decided to keep it simple; the effect of the light, the subtle effect of shadow fascinate her more than big statements in paint. In that sense she feels that she owes more to the French monochromist Yves Klein than to the great painters with lots of colour on their palette. She searches for an intense, spatial experience.

To maintain the effect of shadow, she places her work for example between two glass panels, so that it comes out of the frame and rises above the nature of the painting. When you pass it, it works, it functions as a three-dimensional drawing. You see that she originally remained reasonably faithful to the structure of the material; for example, she only played with the volume of the cubes in the wire, her interventions remained in control. Today, she rather imposes her will on the material, but she nevertheless allows herself to be seduced by its stubbornness and she holds back. She draws in grey levels, plays with depth and brilliance, and solders. Sometimes that way splendid disorderly drops originate on the wire – unique copies that form their own entirely particular handwriting. Just as all the painted dots in her installation monument (rhythmic painting on canvas and sound that is produced by a barrel organ) are hand-painted and therefore original.
The light that falls on her drawings sometimes reminds you of the light that turns silver on the waves of the sea. Sometimes the rhythms wink to the sentences in a book, although not as tightly lined up, so that the drawing is like a page that you can read as you desire. When the artist opens a book herself she often sees no letters but signs that form images together. Of course her work not only prospers by the grace of the light that she filters through her drawings or the play of shadow that she brings up. She chooses her shapes and gives them meaning by placing them in a context. You can see that she seeks the frame around the work, appears to enter into a subtle and civilised fight with it, purely with the intention of renouncing that frame or at least make it less important so that the content is not sentenced for life.
How does she do that? For example by providing her drawings with relief, by trimming the wire surface, tolerating frayed edges, by pulling apart the material as if it was tulle – and yet we are still speaking of iron.
In fact, the framed wire drawings are clotted moments in her research. Together they yield something of the course of the process. Waeyen refuses to hand over a key to disclose her work. She would give anything to make the key entirely redundant, “just as you don’t need a key to understand what a horse is.”

Emile Hollman - January 2011

Translation: Margot Krijnen– February 2011

The rhythms of Natascha Waeyen

The first thing you think of is a lost, lonely firefly, a blue-purple glow tumbling through the night sky. Every unsuspecting driver, on their way through the dark to Heythuysen in the province of Limburg, will later recall being faintly perplexed. And with good reason, they have seen blue and purple lights glowing on the horizon like a mirage in the night.
Were it not for the fact that Natascha Waeyen had already captured the senses of the oncoming traffic. Where the road meets a roundabout artist Natascha Waeyen has built a beautiful pyramid of light. The artwork which comprises 245 galvanised poles and is magically lit after dark attracts its surroundings just as the stars attract dust and rubble. Waeyens pyramid relates as naturally and unnaturally to its surroundings as the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings.
The corners of the pyramid point to the road as though the lanes of asphalt transform into poles, rising in a crescendo to the top of the pyramid where they converge and then flow their separate ways.

At night when the street lights come on, light is shone onto the poles; a different light for each season. During the day the pyramid is transparent and is always there to communicate with and guide the oncoming traffic. The spaces between the pyramid’s poles become narrower as you drive past creating a visual experience of spaces closing and opening. The artist invites you to a sensory game; forces you to notice the space and makes the invisible visible. In a way the Heythuysen pyramid is a metaphor for Waeyen’s skill as an artist; as the roads meet, so the different facets of her artwork come together beautifully.

Natascha Waeyen was born into a family of accountants, roofers and builders in Buggenum near Roermond. She discovered her talent for drawing at an early age and when she was fourteen she knew without a doubt that her future would begin at the art academy. When she was seventeen she first set foot in the art academy in Maastricht, with no big ambitions, no idols from the history of art nor inspiring rolemodels from the present-day.
After around four years she started posing the bigger questions: What is it going to be? What shall I do? That is the style of another, but what is my style?
So, there she was in her studio, waiting for her artistry to flourish.

Natascha Waeyen made two important discoveries that helped her develop as an artist. Firstly, that she would not let herself become restricted by frameworks, walls or borders. She wanted to create an atmosphere powerful enough to transcend the standard or the traditional. “The work must continue out into the space”, she now explains, with rather more conviction than in those days.
Klee, Klein, Schoonhoven and Miró, helped her to formulate an idea about atmosphere and lines. Most importantly, a line should not be drawn in order to confine, contain or restrict a certain atmosphere. Essentially, the Heythuysen pyramid is a play of interminable lines.

The second discovery concerned drawing. She put away her pencil and began drawing instead with iron wire. She took this step in order to escape the boredom of drawing and hoping to find a more subtle and layered form of expression. This choice resulted in work that had a spatiality that Waeyen’s work had thus far lacked. The wire drawing was exactly what she had been searching for. Now she had found her means of expression.

Codes, rhythms and number have always fascinated the artist, their unrelenting regularity, the structures, infinitely repeated. With one glance at nature, you’ll find them all around: in the nerves of a leaf, ripples in the water’s surface, rings in tree trunks, spores on a mushroom, but you’ll also find a pattern on a pair of jeans. You would think that perfectly ordered Zen gardens would make Waeyen’s heart skip a beat, but nothing could be further from the truth. For her it is the rhythm that is important, not the way in which the rhythm is given a form. She doesn’t make art to send a religious message; a pyramid is a form, not content.

Through searching, looking, tasting she discovered the possibilities of something as ordinary as everyday wire mesh. Not the easiest material to work with, but perfect for it’s intended purpose: fence for a pen or chicken run. Natascha Waeyen sought to dematerialise the material; by robbing it of a function, getting to know the material inside-out by forcing her will upon it. She set to work on 1.25 by 1.25 cm pieces of wire mesh, spurred on by the rhythms of the cells of metal wire. She ‘drew’ the usual shapes with it: squares, circles, triangles, rectangles. But also spheres, pyramids, cubes, and dots. They became individual artworks, with a particular shadow, light, space, rhythm, an own purpose and without any pretence.

Waeyen created many pyramids and objects made of countless blocks and wire. In Edinburgh, where she gained a post-graduate degree in painting, these objects were dubbed ‘Mondriaan blocks’ by her fellow students. They assumed it must have had something to do with the flat landscape and horizons of her homeland. Upon which Waeyen would mention the nature of the somewhat more undulating landscape of the southern part of the Netherlands. She had never really been too interested in Mondriaan.

It must have been a thrilling moment for her when she had the idea of incorporating the dice in her work. Die have many things that appeal to the artist: simple form, equal and even surfaces or faces, numbers, rhythm, repetition, a simple concept, a catalytic agent for chance. She approached her exploration of the dice very systematically. She enlarged and reduced dice, giving them an inside and an outside, she interlocked them, she granted the dice a negative shape, explored the shadows of dice, isolated the pips (the dots on a die) and then created new networks of lines.

And so the pips on dice return in a work entitled ‘MoNUment, which comprises so-called ‘rhythmic murals’ and sounds produced by a barrel organ. In this work Waeyen has encoded two thousand years of history and ordered it according to a strict rhythm, drawn up on a canvas measuring nine metres high by three metres wide. At first glance, it appears to be just Braille, but on closer inspection you see that it is an incredible handmade piece of art. The fact that every dot has been painted by hand means that there are irregularities in the work, which afford the work a poetic character. Waeyen does not care for obvious textures. The dotted canvas reminds us so much of the musical notes for a barrel organ that the artist came up with the idea to translate her codes to barrel organ music. Despite the obvious danger that her debut composition would result in noise mayhem and drive people mad, she carried through and presented her work: a cacophony of noise produced on a real barrel organ. “The past two millennia have likewise been a mishmash of events”, the artist responded. MoNUment can thus be seen as the soundtrack to two thousand years of world history condensed into a few noisy moments.

“My work is neither abstract nor figurative”, she says. “It refers to everything around you.” The work acknowledges the surroundings, and the space in which it is situated. The artist simply forces the space onto the viewer; you are forced to experience it differently. But just as light and wind have their own way with the light pyramid, so too does the gaze of the viewer, passing Natascha Waeyen’s work. This concerns all her works, be it the light pyramid, her metal mesh works or the metal wire shapes. “This is my thing, my truth”, she says. “I hope that my art makes people look at things around them in a different way. I hope they may have greater visual awareness; while walking through the woods, they suddenly notice the order of the trees or the way the river and the sky meet the horizon.”

Emile Hollman – March 2008
Translation: Sophia Atkins – February 2009

 

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