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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.

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A way to spend time

It has been a long time since I was a ‘local’ in the scanning room at my University (HKU in Utrecht, The Netherlands). They are days to reminisce about as it felt a bit like a club-house for like-minded creatives (including analog photographers). I have sat many hours in the scanning room (until late on Thursdays if I remember correctly) with my best friend Nathan; listening to some music, joking around, while waiting for this slow scanning process to finish. Such is the nature of analog photography these days; although we shoot on film, usually we want to end up with a digital image because – you know… (Instagram?).

Finally the day has come that I can sit behind this machine again, waiting for those emulsified memories to appear as fresh and clean pixels on my screen. Not at the University this time but at my own desk in my own home. I’m finally a proud owner of an Epson V800. And I have indulged myself by getting SilverFast 8 AI Studio along with it, giving me even sharper scans and better colours. Purchasing it from Scandig (a decent Germany transparency scanner expert) made it feel even more legitimate somehow.

We are still house-bound during the 2020 Covid-19 Lockdown (London, UK). Scanning negatives seems like the perfect quarantine activity you’d almost wish upon anyone who doesn’t know what to do with themselves after prolonged days of boredom. Not that I’m one of those people. I’m so busy with other projects (embroidery, sewing, drawing etc.) that, as a matter of fact, I find the task of scanning my ever expanding archive of negatives slightly daunting. There are currently still about 40 rolls awaiting to be processed and probably more then 60 to be scanned (let alone re-scanning those done on lower-resolution machines in the past while I was waiting for my future purchase).

You know what I’ll be doing!