Prieeltje

Alice Obee
Maybe we are a trace in the snow 2024

The work of Alice Obee is deeply infused with melancholy. Everything is transient, and what was once flawless changes irrevocably with the ravages of time. Time spares nothing or no one. Her installation reaches back to the technique of ‘pojagi’, an ancient Korean textile art. The moment she sets foot in the pavilion of castle estate De Lovie Obee decides to work with pojagi. The technique sparks her melancholy, and triggers a certain anxious imagination.

Weathered, old and disused, the pavilion exudes an atmosphere of days gone by. For Alice Obee, it might as well be part of a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, a last vestige of a lost civilization. Those who listen carefully can still hear the echoes of conversations, whispers. In the pavilion the artist finds the ideal location for her seven pojagi with poems – embroidered by her own hand – which she leaves to the randomness of the elements all summer long. The work is an ode to time, to beauty and transience. At the same time, Alice Obee wants to denounce the decline of craft traditions. During the preparation of the work, she searched in vain for someone to teach her the art of lace-making.

A very specific printing technique – cyanotype – is used to create traces of the lost tradition. They appear as shadows on the fabric: like phantoms, or a mysterious presence. The artist clarifies: “After hanging outside for more than two months, the fabric will be torn apart or fall to pieces. Maybe a panel will fall to the ground. This will demonstrate that it is not possible to prevent things from breaking or disappearing. It answers a question that has been gnawing at my mind, that nothing stays the way it once was, including society. Or, maybe, there will be a different outcome: the fabric panels will have remained quite intact. In this case I will have to question my own melancholy and dark imagination. Perhaps then I have gone too far and my distorted vision of reality, fuelled by a great melancholy, has become a grotesque fantasy.”

— Alice Obee BE, °1998
Alice Obee is a Belgian artist, who studied philosophy. In poetic writings and through textile experiments or photography, she explores her narrative and themes of loss, disappearance and nostalgia. With her quilts, she extends artistic research into the memory of fabrics.

Take me back to the Castle Park.