My name is Annabel Claeys and I'm a contemporary artist from Belgium.

 

The different media I love to use vary from traditional printmaking methods, analogue and digital photography to painting if not combined with experimental printmaking techniques. 

 

In my works I reach for the experience that follows what we perceive; the conscientious perception and the sensation of becoming aware. This awareness arises from past experiences and emotions, and from a general knowledge of things that all humans share in a collective consciousness.

In the process of perceiving and observing we project our particular recollections on the object we observe. We associate it with earlier experiences, and by doing so confer meaning on the object.

 

The subjects that inspires my work spring from personal emotions, recollections, experiences, admiration and wonder. Recurrent themes are the notions of time and transitoriness that become inseparable from this perception.

When I create my images, the same questions come every time. What has happened ? What is to come ? What will remain and be left to stay ?

When preparing and creating I keep asking myself these questions. While doing so the work is veiled in some melancholic awareness of things never to remain. Everything we observe and experience fades and never stays the same. Our memories are only an illusory recollection of what ever was, a deceptive perception of the past. Still, these memories and past experiences form our consciousness and how we shall perceive in the future.

 

I want to create an atmosphere that incites the spectator to start looking for his own truth in the image he sees. By hiding what is in the image, the spectator is committed to search his own awareness and render visible what seems to be absent. What you perceive in the work is a direct reflection of your own consciousness. That’s why there cannot be an absolutely objective observation. Every work carries different possible meanings and truths.

To address the consciousness of the spectator my images propose something present by showing the absence of it. The subject “hides” itself so to speak. It is left to the spectator to (re)discover.