Real Life – Irish Times


REAL LIFE
‘A Time’

Clea van der Grijn sets calendar time against emotional time in a series of beautiful works on paper that visualise the complex layering of experience.

REAL LIFE
Never loved

” i never loved you i only needed you i needed you to love me so that i could leave you ” Van der Grijn’s ‘ Never Loved’ is a heroic feat of honesty and sheer hard work. Highly textured boards – very large and white – form the pages of this great book, whose only sentence is endlessly fractured, its meaning a slippery fish. As well as printed text, each board bears a large Braille letter created from halved ping pong balls. The Braille ( expressing emotional blindness ) reiterates the sentence. It is satisfying to the touch….this is hands on art.
‘Real life’, consisting of 365 coloured paper fragments surrounding drawings of the head, heart and brain, the organs of emotion. Dense handwritten text oceans the illustrations, reminiscent in its free wheeling impressionistic style of the work of Kathy Acker, the avant-garde American novelist.