Hey Franky, thanks a million for your patience and incredible programming skills! The four plates in 2mm stainless that you lasered for me were perfect, but they were only the beginning. Nick Ervinck sliced my Photoshop rendering into sections, Thierry turned the sections into a wooden form, and Norbert and I hammered, cut and welded the steel until it fit the form; then polished it for weeks to achieve the final result.
Never say no to a commission that you are not up to. Say YES and then get up to it. This sculpture, made for Mattheeuws Transport in Veurne, Belgium, brought me to my knees several times before it was done. It was thrilling to push myself and the materials beyond anything even the engineers thought possible. But here it is, 150 kilos of hammered stainless floating off into thin air.
The top floor of the old power station is an immense space with more than 260 windows. The artists of the Zandberg and my own students filled large sheets of Kozo paper with every kind of writing, mark, calligraphy and drawing. With these we created a black and white version of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. The effect was incredible, as if you were entering into the collective brain of all the artists of the show.
Time to catch up on months of news. September 2015: exhibition in the Transfo in Zwevegem, a small town in West Flanders. I brought together calligraphy by artists from De Zandberg, a center for mentally handicapped artists, and work by other artists of my choice. The Transfo is an immense decommissioned power station from the 1930s.
