GRADUATION SPECIAL 18: Irma van Doornmalen

29 mei 2018

Irma van Doornmalen is eindexamenkandidaat 2018 van de opleiding Fine Arts aan de Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam.

0. Nothing. Nothingness plus almost nothing and there is the sum of this thin layer wrapped around our inner self to shape our human body.

Skin. A fleshy substance tightly stressed around a premeditate skeleton of bones.

The mold in where our bodily matter is hiding within.

Desirable trying to feed the inside with the ongoing loss of chemicals that we are constantly aiming to feed our hungry system with.

Craving to taste the lack of water that already dripped out of our skin before we suck it up.

Oppressively gasping for air to breath to refill the loss that our body has spitted out into the world outside.

In and out.

As if the ‘and’ were nothing more than an illusion in between the contrary mechanisms of ‘in’ ‘out’.

As if there were nothing in between.

A space devoid of matter… VACUUM.

Working on the sculpture for VACUUM

Still of the video for VACUUM (Sculpture of plexiglass)

Still of the performance PLASTICITY

“My graduation project ‘VACUUM’ is the tangible installation in response to ‘PLASTICITY’, a performance I presented within an abandoned laboratory on the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Inspired by the STM vacuum machine used within nanotechnology and the cutting tables of laboratory’s I am working on a self contained vacuum machine which will bring a (model of) a human body within a vacuum by following a mechanical rhythm. The installation comes with video projection and sound to emphasise the objectivity of our own body.”