www.karinpeulen.com
2017 - 2018 | Collaboration / Webdesign | Website made with Berta.me
In 2017 Karin Peulen, a visual artist from the Netherlands, and I experimented with ways in which her artistic practice and archive could become digitalized and be presented online. What precisely does making and having an online presence entails for a contemporary artist? Are there other ways of making a website than the usual super stylized portfolio? How, why and for whom should you document, digitalize and present your work? These and other questions resulted in a wholehearted collaboration in which making the website became a tool for mutual learning and understanding.
Karin Peulen is working as a visual artist for more than 25 years but never structurally has archived or documented her work. Therefore, we approached making this website with seeing the digital realm as an opportunity to rethink what it means to archive, structure and grasp an artistic process.
In her work, the often chaotic and spontaneous workprocess is perhaps more important than the endresult. She wants to wander, to move, to meet, not to get somewhere per se but to be surprised and to be wondered. This led us to the idea of the Rhizome, a root like plant with no clear beginning, center or end and a term used by philosopher Gilles Deleuze. We used this concept to base the structure of the website on.
A conventional navigational menu is therefore missing on the website. Instead, a visitor can click on numbers and letters that are randomly spread out over the page and change location every time the page refreshes. This allows for a non-hierarchical and non-chronological structure, offering an overview of her work without an original source or final destination. In doing so, her oeuvre becomes a fragmented whole.
New and old work mutates, metamorphoses, allowing for a cross-fertilization between present, past and future. The structure of the website embodies the unstable nature of a work in progress, it allows for (re)arrangements and growth/decay in the future. It is in between a tableau-vivant and a still-life, in between a portfolio and artwork.
© All images and texts on this website: Ties van Dijk 2024. All Rights Reserved.