“So Many Times, I” – A4, 2024 (made with pictures from the book Collages & Assemblages, Verbeke Foundation 2017)

Each collage in this series begins within strict, self-imposed limits — a quiet ritual of reduction and transformation. One book, one rule: in this case, a publication by the Verbeke Foundation on collage. Page by page, I cut. No page is spared. The first page becomes fragments — torn or sliced at random — and with its front and back, I compose in the centre of a white page. Then the second page. And so on. The material dictates the moment. One must work with what one is given. Chance and serendipity are not just allowed — they are essential companions.

And what you see is not necessarily how it was made. This, too, is part of the process. After assembling a collage, I turn the A4 round and round, letting the piece suggest its own orientation. And finally, i select.

Over time, these images have begun to feel like solitary figures. They no longer speak of their origins. They have slipped free of context, memory, or meaning. I see them more and more as a kind of self-portrait — not in likeness, but in presence. Each one stands alone, quiet, unresolved, as if placed gently in the middle of a wide, white silence.

The German word Fremdkörper comes to mind — a foreign body, something strange and out of place.

And yet, there they are, together strong.