Map with Open Windows – Anna van der Ploeg

To view the exhibition catalogue, click here.

20.08.2020 – 30.08.2020

Map with Open Windows is the third solo exhibition by Anna van der Ploeg. Showcasing work created over the past 18 months in oils and woodblock, the exhibition is a collection of works that look into the sensitivity of decision making.

Throughout the works, van der Ploeg is manifesting a moment in time which may feel ordinary, until the instant it is influenced by a movement of action. You might enter the room much like one of her ambiguous figures, moving through or ordering your thoughts in a moment of recalibration. In the case of Map with Open Windows we are made to glimpse the moment of stepping into or out of something.

The artist is occupied with an idea that Kierkegaard shares: that iterating how we tell a story offers us new lenses through which we might understand it. Van der Ploeg takes pleasure in the retelling of an event, whether it’s through the perspective of a narrator or a view into the detail emphasised differently or just that it is the one chosen to be repeated above others. The appeal of these many accounts is that they lend themselves to manifold interpretations. The story can be told nine times over, each time highlighting another detail, each time understood differently. What does this reveal about the interpreter? We might be reminded of the words by the psychotherapist and essayist Adam Philips: when we speak to one another, things fall out of our pockets.

Her thoughts are documented in the same way, in notebooks and scraps of paper taped around the studio. Collections of quotes, some inscrutable loose ends, an idea. It’s no coincidence that this body of work created over the past 18 months reveals much of what is pressing to her: the relationship of change between the inner and outdoor worlds, be it physical moving from a vast landscape into a courtyard or a more subtle shift, a question at the table that has the potential to change the course of a conversation.

In her work, we see her examination of interior and exterior spaces, from contained compositions inviting us into rooms with tables, guiding us beneath the table into the covert direction of a foot in a moment of re-contemplation. We are soon taken out into the mountains, and back to a washing line seemingly just managing to root garments from taking flight in a gale of uncertainty and motion. Then – is it a gust or is it smoke from a fire? A scribbled note in the studio: Words like pegs on a line, far between and clinging to their linen in the wind – does it have to be about why?

Ambiguity is an essential theme in her work. Is the table just very small or are those feet gently engaged in a gesture of intimacy beneath it? Is it a map or a starched sheet that holds its fold lines? Depicted in most of the works are scenes in their fleeting moments, almost always in movement or captured at the precise instance of determining. There is a sense of anticipation where whatever decision is taken, there will be a pivot, at which things could go one way or another. This tension in the idea of coincidence and consequence becomes interesting. The motion tells us that something is at work. The more curious among us might want to answer that, or we can simply relish at the life on the canvas or scored into woodblock.

What I find so curious is her use of figures and colour in what becomes dream-like, where if we were to collate all these motions and movements we might come to our own conclusions. Much like how the anxious mind might draw on the imagination to predict the future. And to which our sage self knows quite well can never be guaranteed. Similarly, the feeling of anxiety which Kierkegaard writes of, wryly over-estimates the circumstances to the point that reality is not quite felt nor is it clear.

Van der Ploeg has travelled to a selection of residencies from France, Goa and Kawaguchiko, where she investigated her world through motion, materials and contexts. Returning from MI-Lab Japan, she brought her explorations of woodblock into her practice. During her residency there, she was working with Mokuhanga, a water-based woodblock printmaking technique which incorporates the building up of colour in many layers. This background training is evident in her use today with the woodblocks she displays: the form of the artwork themselves, coloured with oil paint and tempered with patience. In Map with Open Windows we see her interrogation of the material and how her use of it has a sense of real ownership. It is in and of itself hers. The woodblocks have become the subjects of her mark-making. They feel particularly authentic and it’s clear that these are the products of intent engagement across the fields of print, painting and woodwork. Her development of an entirely explorative and confident style has been aided during the period of isolation, by spending many long days chiselling away. Featured forms in these series range from anonymous figures moving in the shadows, signs of wind, material, hands and feet – all actors in her play on the fine line of human discomfort in the internal and external worlds.

The work titled ‘Useful boogeyman’ acknowledges the variability of what is imagined in the combination of form for itself but also van der Ploeg’s technique and appreciation for oils. This painting is built up with many layers save for the focal point, the cloth, which is coated in transparent paint revealing the fine weave of cotton calico, but also a stain from the opposite side of the canvas – like the shadows eluded to but never explicitly told of.

Map with Open Windows is based on the title of one of her smaller woodblocks of the same name, one with green and blue squares, with the text inspired, in part, by the print-layout indications in book-making, and in part by a Michael Ondaatjie quote:

I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Her titles are another moment to meditate on the blurred lines of interior and external, linking direction and choice and people with scenes of potential escape. Another note, a proverb collected by the artist: some people open a window to close a door, points to the disorienting feeling of always searching. About two years ago she’d sketched a map into a notebook. On recently finding it, she mistook it for a window just drawn a bit badly. With a trick of the eye, a map became a window, but one that could be folded up and carried in a pocket, only to be taken out later and gazed out of. Can she open the window then, and slip out? The titles are themselves instances of retelling. The same basic objects, figures and symbols recur, but the vantage keeps moving. It’s no coincidence that this layered meaning evident in the figurative oils is what frames the show. The simplicity of the woodblock, the materials and the mark-making brings us to the essence of what it is to contemplate escape: our willful desire to self-destruct and advance at the same time, and often at the hands of our own vaguely drawn maps, searching for the window of time that never comes.

You might agree that her use of titles are the perfect companion to her works. They do not necessarily give an explanation or instruct the viewer in any particular way, but provide room for her knack of getting a thought across that brings a sense of grounding to her works. Which, inevitably, leave you wanting to have a conversation with the artist. Consider the works to be paired with titles as an added detail – honing in on something you might want to understand for yourself and nothing else. Something about a cipher explains the use of figures in van der Ploeg’s work – a person who fills a space but is of no importance. The presence of the cipher – much like any moment until it is larger than the rest – is of some to little consequence, any larger than that we won’t know until it happens.

Map with Open Windows invites a contemplation of these spaces where decision is taken and therefore of possibility, which we ought to enjoy. It’s the retelling of the flick of the lovers’ toes, a tenuous seating arrangement, a reaching out, hands on hands. The revision becomes interesting when absolutely nothing is conclusive, leaving us with only the flavour of the suggestive. It’s with this in mind that the curiosity should always stick with the viewer and never, ever should the viewer be confronted with the finality of anything.

Kerri von Geusau

August 2020