What do we take with us, and what do we cast off? Hanneke Klinkum symbolically poses this question in her sculptures and drawings. As an artist she can be regarded as an animal which, caught in a trap, chews off its own leg in order to regain freedom. Adhering to the rules is impossible in visual art, because these are subject to change with every work that is made and observed. Each image involves a different way of dealing with the observational factors. We're always seeing something else.
A Lone Wolf
Hanneke Klinkum bites off her leg
Within an artist's body of work, images might resemble each other considerably; yet they can never be viewed according to the same criteria. With Hanneke Klinkum's highly interrelated images – in which she links the animal and the human, the physical and the mental – that is a given fact. Every image can be recognized as her own, but it eludes any previous meaning ever ascribed to an individual work of hers. Just as a deer grows new and different -larger, more defiant and more vulnerable-antlers every year, Hanneke Klinkum's work continually takes new shape. That which she has cast off cannot be reworked and made again. Something else has to be produced.
Hanneke Klinkum is no deer but a she-wolf. A lone wolf, far from the pack. The world of Dutch sculpture is a small one, since this is not really a country of sculptors – ceramists and builders at most. Every sculptor in the Netherlands constitutes an exception and is thereby unique. That can be said about Hanneke Klinkum in particular. She scrapes bones, finds antlers, gathers bark and binds up tails. Organic material that decays at varying rates is used by her to create sculptures resembling pseudo fossils. We recognize her work from a distance, but if we come closer we see that we've been profoundly mistaken. At first we see a stairway, a coat of hair, a coat rack and a candleholder. We climb the stairs, hang up the coat and light the candles. In that light we see deer hooves, a horse's tail, an antler beam and tangled horns. We see how the creatures decay, how we decay. How we are the earth's outcasts. Be it fair or unfair, we are there for those who find us. They will never restore us to who we were, but generate who we ultimately are.
In her work on paper Hanneke Klinkum is not sculptural but tenuous. The sculptural work always has a concrete shape, but a drawing sooner takes the shape of the unseen, the unforeseen. It does not portray the real but offers, instead, a solution to what we might be seeing. In that solution, observations converge. Among other things, she draws trees. Basically these are in abundance, but not in the way that she draws them. She draws them as single images, and as such they become potential sculpture. The only problem is: such sculpture would be impossible to carry out. They are drawn. They must be handled with kid gloves.
—
Alex de Vries | From: Hanneke Klinkum, sculpures – drawings | 2009
hanneke klinkum
Tilburg, The Netherlands 1950
Textile Art School, Tilburg 1967-1970
Academy for Visual Arts, Tilburg 1970-1973
Lives and works in Tilburg (Netherlands) and Ayamonte (Spain)