Liquid wall sculptures are frozen in the exact moment before they release a gathering drop of fluid. Seemingly pliable organic vessels invite touching but respond with rigid, unyielding surfaces. Normally hidden glands and organs are yanked from their bodily context and revealed to be strangely beautiful individual forms.
Van Bakel’s work is, in fact, a continual study in opposites: it is both dynamic and static, transparent and opaque, reflective and absorptive, artificial and natural, familiar and alien.
But van Bakel’s work is not only organic, it also reflects a machine-made, manufactured aesthetic. In a way that few craft practitioners or artists can ever hope to attain, these pieces demonstrate a potent unmistakable design sensibility known as product semantics, as well as an intuitive grasp of grip-based ergonomics, even though it is likely that neither of those concerns was paramount to the artist’s intention.
It is clear that van Bakel has been a fan of scientific imagery, especially of nature with its various iridescent birds, bioluminiscent fish, and improbably-enabled insects. She seems particularly inspired by the hidden imagery provided by microscopy, particulary the popping, three-dimensionally intricate details that the scanning electron microscope provides. These images, in my own experience, have a restorative effect. They restore the sense of wonder, the precious inner feelings of awe that one has as a youth.
For van Bakel, her projects investigate life, what life looks like at an early but advancing state; if there is such a thing as a big secret to be revealed about here work, it might in fact be this: much of her work is about life itself – about coaxing the mystery, that incandescent and magical-when-it-is-experienced spark, out of pure lifeless matter.
From: ‘Encounter’
Text by: Steven Skov Holt,
Editor, critic and curator CCA / California College of the Arts.
