Connie Dekker
Visual artist – tree drawings, embroidery installations, performance, video and photographyLatest drawings – Into the trees
Into the Trees is my latest series of drawings. I depict weathered, timeworn trees and the creatures who call them home. The trees are not a backdrop, but active figures that shape the stories of the beings living in their hollows.
In these drawings, human lives seem to fade, while fairy-tale figures we thought forgotten quietly reappear. From the depths of our dreams, they re-emerge, waking once more inside the trunks and branches, waiting for those who dare to look a little longer.
Related works
Large tree series
Are you at home?
Exhibition
2020, La Pléiade, Espace Culturel, Commentry, France
Are you at home? is a series of drawings on trees, rocks and their inhabitants. These figures have withdrawn from everyday life; they sleep in hollows and caves rather than in ordinary beds. Their chosen shelters recall bear holes or mountain grottos rather than houses
They do not belong to the rhythm of 21st-century life. Instead, they seem to inhabit a parallel time, somewhere between solitude, obsession and devotion. The drawings are a quiet homage to Count Henry Russell, the 19th-century hermit of the Pyrenees, and to all those who disappear into the landscape rather than stand in front of it.
Performance – Lo soffia il cielo, cosí
Dutch poets F. van Dixhhoorn, Melle Hammer, Hans Kloos, K. Michel and F. Starik wrote variations on an example by Baudelaire, all circling around waiting and absence. As the performance unfolds, the girls move through the space like a living score, carrying lines of poetry that might drift away at any moment.
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais
Baudelaire
Embroidery – Swan swarms
In the embroidered sceneries of the Swan Swarms series, one theme is developed in many possible patterns. Pillows, curtains and textile fragments form small stages where swans drift and gather.
The installations are theatrical, but their world is sleepy. Repetition and variations in the stitching transform everyday textiles into a place where one may rest, float, and quietly disappear from view.
video & photography
Many of my videos begin with collections: French mid-century vases, Arcopal dinnerware, ribbons from the first half of the 20th century, or the slow movement of curtains and everyday objects. From these collections I create retrograde video slideshows – quiet sequences where objects are allowed to perform, turn and repeat themselves.
The works Arcopal Lullaby, 115 Ribbons and Window Tavarnelle follow this logic of looking again, each in a different way: Arcopal Lullaby and 115 Ribbons move through sequences of collected objects, one after another, while Window Tavarnelle stays with a single window so that small shifts in light and time become visible.
Embroidery
The garden of speech
In memoriam of my father
Leendert Jan Dekker +1992
The Garden of Speech is an ongoing embroidery project in memory of my father, Leendert Jan Dekker (†1992). When someone dies, in the long light of history, the smallest gestures and everyday objects disappear first; they slip out of the record, taking their modest stories with them.
Two years after his death, in 1994, I began to embroider his drawings in stem stitch on sheets and pillows. Over time, a growing garden of figures and lines has appeared across the fabric – a place where his hand, my hand and the passing of years remain stitched together.