By Isabel Ferreira de Sousa
Ilona van den Brekel takes the different ways people experience everyday life as the point of departure for her artistic practice. We talked about her interest in materiality and form, the pieces selected for Alma Archive and her favourite books.
You have a background in Law. How did you become an artist?
When you are young, you think you have to live up to certain expectations set by your parents. Later, I realized than those expectations were merely assumptions from my side. After working in labor law and human resources for thirteen years, I decided to follow my heart and applied to the Art Academy in Maastricht – fortunately, I got accepted.
I’ve always had an interest in art, particularly in design when I was young, and I am still fascinated by form, colour, and function — drawn especially to the Bauhaus, minimalism, and the artists of Arte Povera, including Giuseppe Penone.
At the Art Academy, I chose the autonomous track – the fine arts direction – where the focus was on everything except function. That is something I am still grappling with in my work: does it have a function or not? Of course, people can decide that for themselves.
You draw inspiration from how people perceive and experience everyday life. Can you give an example? And how is this reflected in your work?
When someone says: ‘Look at that’, there’s no guarantee they see exactly what you see. The same applies to my work. I’d say that the objects I create have a deceptive quality – their shapes might suggest one thing but that isn’t necessarily what they actually are.
Is that when abstraction comes in?
Objects can be functional or not. It’s often a personal choice, so not up to me to decide. This is particularly visible in my series Building Blocks. Is it a vase or not? It certainly wasn’t created as one, but purely as an object. Still, I can’t stop some people from seeing it as a vase.
You work with different mediums. How do you relate to each one of them?
Someone once told me that I work with different materials because I get bored easily. I think there’s some truth to that. I’m curious about everything and enjoy working across different mediums. It also adds extra tension, because I don’t know beforehand how a particular material will work. Though not everything turns out how I imagined it beforehand, the advantage is that I can then approach it in a different way.
How do you work?
It usually begins with a thought or an image in my mind. From there, I develop it further through design and a specific material – film, stoneware, metal or glass. The process is often more complicated than I initially thought, but I like a challenge.
Can you say something about the pieces you’ve selected for Alma Archive?
Building Blocks is the result of a ceramic experiment I did a couple of years ago. The pieces selected for Alma Archive are my first experiments with form allowing me to further develop them. I started with stoneware, then decided to try other materials, and glass was my first choice. Working with this material made me think of new forms and shapes. It was an intensive and laborious process, but I’m very happy with how it turned out.
The glass pieces are blue. Why this colour?
For me, blue and glass go very well together — it is as if the colour belongs to the material. Recycled glass was the first glass I worked with, and it also has a blue tint. With my initial ceramic objects Building Blocks, I sticked to the colours of the material and didn’t apply any pigments. Here, I decided to do so, but when choosing the colour, I looked at recycled glass and settled on blue —petrol blue, to be precise. I think it’s a beautiful colour.
What’s your next challenge?
My next challenge is finishing the entire series in glass, and after that I want to move on to wood. This means learning to work with a CNC machine and learning to draw in 3D. I’m already looking forward to it.
This interview has been edited for clarity with Ilona van den Brekel’s consent.