Summer Studio

23 August 2024

Carolien Adriaansche's work always has something double. For as imaginative as the clouds and swarms and cities she builds are, they have an aftertaste due to her choice of material: plastic. For 30 years, she has been using the same disposable plastic that has become so synonymous with environmental pollution. In doing so, she calls attention to climate change, sea level rise and the decline of biodiversity, Adriaansche says. Who quietly compares herself to a waste disposal company, given the many often discarded materials she strips of their temporality by turning them into art.
Usually, these are coloured plastics, but the Summer Studio offered an excellent opportunity to try something new: colourless transparent plastic. This is increasingly coming into production because it is more recyclable, and Adriaansche wanted to experiment with its visual possibilities. What effects does it have, are the views interesting, or does the texture fall away?
Having familiarised herself with the building's architecture in the Summer Studio, she finally decided to use both types of plastic: transparent and with colour. From transparent spheres, she built a cloud around a support beam from which it rises like a collection of bubbles. Like an orange snake she hung from another beam, it is full of repeating shapes that exude a certain endlessness - befitting the Pandora's box that became the invention of the endless flow of plastic last century.
In a third installation, she combined transparency and colour: a translucent plastic showcase, containing colourful objects, aesthetically arranged by colour and shape. Showpieces, in other words, made from discarded material that is so elegant and spot-on that you immediately see that this plastic itself does not incite disposability. It is our nonchalant handling that creates pollution, and as Adriaansche shows: see the beauty, and be sparing with it.

Text: Sandra Smeets

Many thanks
CBK Zeeland
Fellow exhibitors: Amerenste Koopman, Adinda de Kousemaeker, Jonathan Straatman en Nelleke Bosland