Yvonne Struys - Etching, Nude

In the most diverse places, in unexpected situations and sometimes in harsh circumstances, Yvonne Struys makes her quests. She consciously chooses her travel destinations, but whether she travels to the far North or undertakes a journey in the spirit, she is always surprised by her discoveries. She likes to follow the old paths from history and listen to the myths and folk tales. She collects songs from the country and is inspired by the music. Her preference goes out to old and lived-through materials with a history of their own. She processes them and adds language to them: a stanza from a poem, from a heroic epic or a song. By weaving them together she creates a new story, unwritten and unknown. Only the viewer can suspect it. It is a story about gods, heroes and saints who struggle for existence, about the trials and inner conflicts of man. But not only about that, it is also, and perhaps even more about, the striving, the search and the longing for peace and introspection. In the title of her installation 'The way is so heavy, and so weed and so far' a Groninger recognizes a stanza from a song of the Three Kings, but in the work nothing reminds of the three wise men from the east. Here old horse harnesses, saddles and peat loaves have been brought together into a tranquil work of art that recalls the history of the peat cutters and the toiling horses that pulled the peat barges. History has been lifted out of time by this work and recreated in a tranquil retrospective of the trials. The ruggedness and desolation of the Orkneys and the Hebrides appeal to the imagination of Yvonne Struys. Her work 'Soft piled centuries' - a quote from a poem by the poet Seamus Heaney - is an ode to the long history of the peatlands. She has brought Celtic poems and legends that threaten to disappear in the ocean of time back to life; quotes appear in her work like wreckage. For example, 'Wrecks in blue water' refers to a Gaelic poem. It is a painting on handmade paper, with a relief that reminds us of the wooden frames of old ships covered with animal skins. In the depths they lie in the intense blue water, a few silent lines of the poem flow past. The titles of her work are about silence, directly or indirectly: 'The place of silence' and 'Sound is stuck in time'. Typical is her work 'Inkeer', an installation made of old heavy sails, truly grand in size. The artist has printed them with texts by Celan, with parts of psalms and hymns and with images of feet, searching, wandering and pushing off. The old, artisanally made sails have a long service history behind them, now they have been transformed into sky indicators on which religious texts and bare feet search for a spiritual, heavenly connection. The feet of the divine Atè, the goddess of doom, the powerful, the lightning-fast daughter of Zeus, can be found on a three-part canvas, entitled 'Atè'. They seem to be dancing, to what music? They are moving and mysterious. The bronze feet of the work 'Hink-stap-sprong' seem to transcend ordinary gravity. Struys' work is a confrontation with a mysterious area that lies on the threshold of a world in which a battle is taking place, where gods seem to descend to earth and earthly forces reach for the heavens. What she captures with her works are moving testimonies of the moments when the battle is briefly stopped and everything holds its breath, when everything changes. They are timeless in their own space and give the impression of visionary threshold markers to eternity. text: Jana Loose