Emmeline and Lisa have known each other since childhood, resulting in a shared sense of aesthetics. Rituals gone awry, homespun wool and neon pink powder, the work of the two woman in Probe reflects their past and the complicated longing for the natural.

How different was it to work in the space of Probe compared to other Exhibition spaces?

Emmeline: The small scale of the space works quite psychologically, it kind of feels like a children's hut made out of fabric, you used to build as a kid, because of that, working in the space makes it immediately playful, literally light weighting, but at the same time you can make visually monumental looking, "adult like" work.

Lisa: We did not work any different compared to other spaces. The only difference was the way we worked. The fact that we worked together and that we were physically near to each other. With two in Probe can be a tight fit, you hear each other breathe, you smell each other…, and that was also something that reminded us of our past. We were extremely close and intimate before we went our own, individual ways. The funny thing was that working in Probe is like being in a bubble, in your own world and that felt again very familiar to our childhood friendship. We were extremely good at creating our own world.
Being in probe and working literally side by side felt therefore natural and self-evident.

What did you want to create?
As two long term friends, we've known each other since 19 years, we thought it was time to collaborate on an artistic project for the first time.
As teenage girls we often went on long walks, fantasizing about the future and sharing romantic ideas about our artistic future. We both grew up in small towns with lot's of nature around and we were both sent to a Waldorf School, all factors that probably contributed to our romantic view on the world at that time.
Influenced by Waldorf eduction, we were both very much into handcrafts, working with natural materials and non-rectilinear forms and we found that even in our current artistic practice, those are still influential.
For this show we wanted to draw from this common background and at the same time look for a certain dissonance, as a confrontation between our protected childhood and our current adulthood. This is why we were looking for some kind of friction in the materials we were using, a confrontation between the "protected natural" and the "modern unnatural", by working with both typical Waldorf materials, such as un-dyed wool and natural clay, and mix them with "hard" and "modern" materials such as plastic foil, plexiglas and fluorescent pigments.
Crawling on our knees in the small children's space of Probe, we went back to the intuitive art-making of our childhood as an attempt to restore the balance between the nostalgic natural and the harsh unnatural of the "outside world".

www.emmelinedemooij.com

www.lisavieten.nl