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Starting Points

Artist
Artist Othilia Verdurmen directs her efforts to the development and realization of spatial installations in combination with soundscapes and theatrical lighting. They are museum performances that appeal to all senses – they stimulate sight, touch, hearing and movement.

Othilia Verdurmen
My work takes place at the interface of visual art and theatre. Myths and narratives are my sources of inspiration. I depict emotions in a dynamic and abstract manner. In this context, I express myself in rubber, plastic, textile and leather, among other things. I process lighting wires and LED illumination in the innards of the installation. The visitor can relate to the artwork in a completely individual way. A figurative form may be recognizable from a distance but, on closer inspection, it is more a matter of a landscape in colour, form and structure, a varied palette of refined life forms that jointly constitute a fabric, like a skin. When you walk through the installation, a film unfolds almost automatically. It is a sequence of images and associations that find some kind of coherence. In this way a story is born.

Structure: a fabric of form and colour
A form should provide just enough foothold to draw attention, but just when you think you are able to determine the form, that you know it, you discover another new aspect. I do not wish to evoke serenity – on the contrary. I seek restlessness.  Extreme colours adjacent to one another give a background full of energy. Depth consists of the tension that is generated between colours and structures. In fact, I treat my materials like a painter treat his or her paint. I place layer upon layer and set them up against one another. The forms are grouped together in a dancing rhythm until everything comes alive.

Theatrical lighting
The materials that are used for the surface of a sculpture react strongly to illumination. Due to a well-balanced light spectacle, consisting of coloured and white light, new images and associations latent in the installation, as it were, are produced. The emotional temperature changes under the influence of light, and a storyline is depicted. LED lighting and fibreglass cable are embedded in the sculpture itself and combined with structures. Accordingly, light from within also forms a component of the surface skin of a sculpture.

Soundscape
A soundscape completes the installation. Associatively, all the different sounds link up to form a single entity. In doing so, the music and the lighting embrace the installation in a timeline. It is precisely this timeline that forms a bridge to the spectator and invites him or her to undergo the atmospheric and dramatic build-up of the implicit story of the sculptural installation. In this way, several dimensions are mutually combined.

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