Looking (back) at my own work

Currently my time is been spent on lots of things other than my creative endeavours (of which my personal blog/website is one). My camera has only joined me on the larger trips, my sewing machine and film-scanner have been boxed up and stored away, even my small bag of embroidery tools has been floating around without being used much.
  Life can sometimes get in the way of creativity. When the only time you have for these endeavours is spare time outside of your day-to-day work and lives obligations. This is particularly true when you’re trying to buy a house, build a home and start a family. Sometimes creativity has to be put on the back-burner to progress in life so that your living environment can grow bigger, which in turn will provide you with more space to grow creatively as well. But that’d assume that life admin, settling or a day-job couldn’t or wouldn’t be a creative outlet for me. To some extend this is true, as my hobbies are my most challenging creative pursuits and exercises. On the other hand; my work at de Belastingdienst challenges me in completely new and unfamiliar ways (professionally and creatively) and finding/renovating a home has made me thinking and working more in three-dimensional space.

De Verdieping

Serendipitously I had been asked to participate in an exhibition right at this time when I was going through a re-start of sorts. De Verdieping is an exhibition by current graphic design students of the University of the Arts Utrecht. They were asked to approach an alumnus of the same course. They would exhibit a work of mine together with a work made in response to that by one of the students (Floor van den Bergh in my case). I have used this opportunity to summarise a certain period in my work/life, accumulated in the Bugao Li jacket. Below is the to be exhibited diptych and accompanying wall description:

After designing the annual 2nd-years graphic design course’s exhibition ‘HQ’ in 2012, I was invited to travel to China. It fascinated me tremendously, to the extent that I returned and eventually would spend most of my graduating year over there. Graphic design is my professional expertise, but in my personal time do I like to work with photography and clothing design. Working with concepts (something my degree has thought me) also comes to the fore in my hobby’s. This work is an accumulation of all these interests; inspired by the history of Shanghai, I made this jacket as if it were that of a gatekeeper in one of the Lilong alleyway estates ‘Cité Bourgogne’ (1930) in the old French Concession.