Ielse Slager

Innerness as a world exists primarily in my imagination, but by drawing I can connect to this world and these ideas. I am leaving the boundaries of the 2D drawing world and having my work exist in our world to enwrap the viewer. I combine drawings with different techniques. While drawing I also place my soul towards the object of my affection, the growing drawing. My soul is in motion as it travels over the surface of the paper.
As I was working in the studio at the end of the year, I kneeled as I did in wonder before the mountain I had visited during the study trip to Glasgow. As I closed my eyes it took me away to the past and over the sea towards Loch Lomond where I faced the lake from a high place and the small islands ascended from my eyes like footprints I wanted to follow. In my studio I envisioned the place where my knees became soaked from the grass on top of the mountain. In reliving a past action by doing something similar, my spirit creates a connection through space and time and makes me a traveller in my mind.

At the moment I am researching the soul and the spirit with its definition and powers. We often place our souls inside ourselves, as we see the soul as something related to the subconscious, something mystified and hidden. But to me the soul is something more. The soul is motion, the soul is spirit and the spirit travels between the two planes we are most familiar with — our interior versus everything else. 

In Dutch you have the word bezielen, which means to place one’s soul outside of oneself and give something else soul — or a sphere of observation, as Peter Slotendijk defines it. If you mention an object that is bezielt it means that it has been given a soul by someone. The distance in space, and sometimes in time, between the object of bezieling and the person accountable is something I want to give shape to.

I have been reading about the necessity of changing our way of thinking about the soul, about our place in our world and taking care of both. Thomas Moore pleads that mankind should take care of the soul more and I join this cause. Moore also talks about this motion of our soul between the outer and the inner, and how the outside can feed the inside with beauty and awe. Without the motion of spirit or soul we can’t connect to the outside world through bezieling, and without motion we just stand still and can’t grow.