BOISBUCHET RESIDENCY PROGRAMME
MIEKE VAN OORSCHOT
SEASON 2022
The cycle project started with a theatre play Mieke saw in the Netherlands, about a resistance hero in the war. During the play the actor sat on a bike. At home Mieke wrote a text and started making the drawings. She decided to bring them with her to Boisbuchet, though she didn’t have any plans with it at first. But the first day at the workshop Mieke started to create this cyclist on the ground with materials she found there.
During the rest of the week Mieke was editing the drawings and the figure on her phone during the evenings in her room. She animated the images and put the text underneath.
At the same time Mieke began creating small sculptures, also with found materials. They had themes of being vulnerable, of resilience and of being part of a social structure. After these intuitive creations Mieke felt the urge to make something very logical/ mathematical. That became the tensegrity model.
But the thing Mieke really wanted to make was a sculpture out of reed. She didn’t have a clue how to do this however. She just started to wrap the reed around a branch and found out it started to look like a nest. At her presentation Mathias, artistic director at Boisbuchet, held a speech about this process of the starting point of vulnerability ending in this safe nest with the metaphor of the everlasting turning wheel. Mieke suspended the nest in the tree at the wind mill site in the end.
The last project Mieke worked on in this week were the drawings. She felt like giving something back to all the people walking on the Domaine. She made the ‘one-line- drawings’ and invited the guests at her presentation to choose one as a gift.
