Hedwig Brouckaert

Artist Statement

Magazines and newspapers are the source of my recent work. I work with magazines that people give me or with what I can find in local libraries and bookshops. Depending on where I am I get different material. I transfer images of figures, tracing them by hand, one by one, and layering them. The figures lose their personal characteristics and become part of a mass, a zigzagging chaos of lines.

I am interested in the tension between the highly representational and readable starting point
- mostly advertisements, which have to get a message across as clearly as possible - and the abstracted, illegible result of the layering process. The final drawing is a sort of compact image of the whole magazine: All the information is in there, but condensed and illegible.
The media defines our experience of the world and reality extensively, maybe more than our direct experiences do.

The acts of cataloguing, categorizing and ordering are fascinating to me. I rearrange the magazines following different sets of rules. I order the images of figures, for example, by magazine issue, or by posture: standing, seated, lying down. Following these principles, I lose a degree of control over how a drawing will eventually look. That tension between chaos and order, serendipity and control is what I seek to visualize.