Some months ago Maike Hemmers (1987, Germany) proposed to stay in Daily Practice for two months, to reflect on her practice. After a dialogue, hearing that she wishes to work also on a serie of new drawings and paintings, Daily Practice is delighted that it can offer Maike Hemmers to work in September and October in the studio of artist Erik van Lieshout -who is working abroad for some time- to develop new large scale works.

Maike writes:

“When I approached you beginning of the year, I was considering this as a period of stillness and reflection. An open space in which things could come. Looking at it now from the perspective of a year already happened for 3/4, I see it in reference to the collaborations and workshops exchanges I have done. As well as the death of my beloved granmother at the very start of this years. Something that has affected me very strongly, and was part of all the paintings I have done in the months after. The period now feels like a threshold moment in which I want to let this settle. I thought of it as a period of gathering sediment. But when I think about what the different works are about than it is more of an inbetween-ness of states.

So as I title I have now: The permeable of a state

And this I want to keep as my orientation of what I want to do in drawing and painting the coming two months. The permeable is open, changing, itself but also open to another. So it is like all the themes of the past months: dying and living, inside and outside the body, the cognitive and the pre-cognitive, the individual and the collective. My grandmother’s dying, the fascia workshop, the rope workshop exploring “death is delicious,” the Stone Falling performance, the brick dust from her house ground into paint. Everything sits at a threshold, at the moment of transformation from one state into another.

While a lot of workshop moments have happened this year, all done in collaboration (with another person, with the participants, with material), the paintings give an internal and affective translation of that. So then I am also wondering what kind of step they will become? My work often builds from a bodily methodology towards painting. The question is now how will the paintings become if they are based on what happened inside the collective exchanges? Will they answer to it, respond, reflect? These are questions I am holding for myself. Wanting them to connect to one to the other, and curious how apparent or not they will be.

And then lastly, they are about what cannot be talked about. I am using these words to make clear to you and to me what I am working with. But in the end, it is very much about not being with words, but being with what we can feel and what exists beyond pure cognitive understanding.”

This might be followed by a presentation and/or a reflective period in November in Daily Practice itself. But this is to find out the coming two months.
Thanks Erik and Welcome Maike!