Lotte Geeven

Lotte Geeven

Work from her oeuvre.

“Throughout her work Geeven reveals splintered structures, reducing them to lines. Her city is a subway map and her mountain is a stripped vista. Working in multiple dimensions, she reveals a private and whimsical world hidden around the city, creating a non-existent space so that we can partake in her imaginative journeys…

…’This city doesn’t exist, only in your mind and only in form language. This is the place where we’ll meet.’

A journey to a far metropolis starts in my head as a book; she grows and gets intertwined with the everyday until I meet her counter image; this encounter into the heart of distance is the beginning of my story.

Upon arrival the city functions as a décor but when time passes by gradually I become part of her. This fading of the border between identity and location I research within my artistic practice. To stimulate the shifting of this border I make endless walks with all my senses sharpened, this way the city wins terrain in me and I in her and this is crucial. During my walks I make notes of ephemeral background details I come across, they become the main ingredients of my story.

There are many ways of storytelling; I am researching storytelling with only these background details: the information in between. The way a whole city can unfold from a single detail and a landscape can grow around a single smell. Using drawings, objects and installations I want to construct in tones the layers and coulisses of this scent. Large-scale drawings here function as the base tone, the backdrop; in here observations of smallbackground details from the place I’m staying grow rank in patterns and maps. The repetitive characters these patterns are an image type that function as a landscape you look over without focusing. It is in fact an image that functions as a Trojan Horse, something seemingly benignant that plants, with the power of spell, a story in your mind through a backdoor.
In my three-dimensional work, thinking as a draws man I build props that create the front layers of this coulisses. While building I try to construct an image vocabulary in the dialect of me and the city I am at; here the shape, material, intensity and size have to justify the character of the encounter with my new surrounding.
In the final stage I’m bringing together thecoulisses, creating a net of landmarks that together tell you the edges andcorners of a mystical border area between me and the city I’m at. An abstract mental domain where the viewer is left as overwhelmed, unstable ore surprised as I was.” – Lotte Geeven