Annette Defoort °Belgium 1945
I am a self-taught artist who doesn’t care about any trend or fashion in art. That’s the essence of my work: two hands in the strength of the earth. I constantly stay close to the earth, close to the basis and each time new variations of elementary forms full of dynamism and movement arise from this same earth, this ground, this clay. My art consists in arbitrarily joining together different slices of clay which were cut into pieces. I build up the sculpture from the inside. I try to treat the clay as seldom as possible from the outside. My sculptures are archetypes of people and animals. Every impression of perfection is consciously avoided; the rough, the unpolished, the nonplanned and the noncharming is maintained throughout the whole work. Spontaneity takes control of the process so that the sculpture builds itself without much interfering by myself. My first aim is expression of what lives inside. (Annette Defoort)
“Primitive cultures, living very close to the earth and preoccupied with the most basic necessities of life; one can easily imagine that their art, particularly sculpture, shows a part of it. The material itself –we speak here about clay- is connected with the most diverse associations and “memories” of prehistoric times, that in one or other way, we still carry deep-down in ourselves. Annette Defoort succeeds in persuading clay to show us once more the face of those long-gone centuries. You almost have the impression that the clay itself relinquishes with some hesitation and some dislike the sculptures she makes. This gives them a very strong expressiveness as nobody who watches this work, sees or considers the personality of the artist as being a stamp on modelling and attitude. This art is surprising and new, just because it harks back so enormously numerous centuries.” Frans Jeursen (NL)
