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Embrace Melancholy - The Black Mirror - NEL VERBEKE
The black mirror seems to absorb rather than to reflect. Only when approached closely, a dark silhouette manifests itself on its surface. This is not the echo of our existence we’re used to. Whereas a mirror reflects the things in front of it immediately and directly, the black mirror seems to deliberately delay this directness and to bypass the surficial accuracy.
As the black mirror moves away from the conventional effect of a mirror, it allows us to contemplate on what is often obscured by our image. It replaces the usual shallow reflection by an image of the self that includes the emotions that shaped it. The act of watching becomes an act of thinking and feeling, intensified and decelerated.
The mirror’s reflecting ability is achieved by slowly waxing its surface with ashes of the parts that were removed. This strange duality, where remnants enact the vision on what continues to exist, is an abstraction of our own persistence in relation to what we had to leave behind.
Limited Edition of 8 (+1AP +1PT)
Unique
THE DESIGNER
BRUT Collective
Antwerp, Belgium
Bram Vanderbeke (b.1991), lives and works in Ghent, and graduated in 2016 from the Design Academy Eindhoven. His work is diverse, and has a sculptural and monumental form of language. Bram explores and reforms relationships between object, environment and user, and plays with materials, form and functionality. His objects are artistic manifestations in which their functionality is not delineated.
Ben Storms (b.1983) lives and works in Antwerp. Thinking in terms of matter, he tends to assemble form, material and technique in a way that is both innovative and compelling. Ben prefers to start with one material and then look at it without prejudice. His research is similarly uninhibited, ensuring he captures all the possibilities the material has to offer. By probing its boundaries to and beyond the limits, he creates a rather surprising language of form.
Charlotte Jonckheer (b.1988) works on various design projects with flexible partnerships. Her main focus is the emotional value sparked by the use of a design object. Inspired by nature and human behaviour, she plays with anticipation and familiarisation to create designs that intrigue their user and activate interaction.
Linde Freya Tangelder (b.1987) is originally from the Netherlands but is based in Brussels with her studio, destroyers/builders. With a focus on materiality, the studio strives for sensory relevance and cultural value in detail and on a larger scale. Her works have a sculptural and architectural character and are on the edge of contemporary material use and traditional crafts. Working with a wide range of materials – high and low-valued – new values arise. Linde Freya develops objects and projects, based on a method from where material and objects can grow into architectural interventions. She opens up traditional usage and transforms knowledge into new ways of bringing an object closer to our senses. The studio takes on projects that range from limited editions to commissioned projects.
Nel Verbeke (b.1989) lives and works in Brussels. With a background in visual art and a specialisation in design and design research, Nel is primarily a concept designer. Balancing between arts and design, her vocation will always be the emotional potential of shape and space. Fascinated by conceptual thinking, she shies away from the obvious focus.
