Apolline Bökkerink (b.1998, London)
To value a texture
akin to diaphanous relics
When the ear tells the eye where to look
A joy-noir erotic, eroding our city of skins.
To the Shinies displaced in the seams of a capital -
a toast! How to be both (Smith, 2014),
and if,
to be most?
surrealism
Inspired by Andre Breton’s Nadja (Breton, 1928), and more broadly the Surrealist movement of the 1930s, I wish to glean alternative value systems from the kilo sale of surfaces waylaying a city. Surfaces which I understand as layers of material change. They are my windows towards a Poétique de la relation (Glissant, 1990). I explore this through my drawings and mixed-media assemblages, where every mark made is an attempt to access the underbelly of unfixed subconscious material agreements.
streetlight
My hope is to elucidate on how our value systems are built on erasure of other potential subconscious agreements, particularly from within an urban context. I find the illegible details of past uses implanted onto the façades of buildings entirely arresting, for they indicate what is apparently collectively valued. For this reason, I’m interested in what lets the light partially in, what held so that it might not exist in the dark forever. This is why a lot of my work features high-visibility polycarbonate (3M) road signage as a form of borrowing and redirecting attention to alternative forms of association.
skins
I look to layers in surfaces in an attempt to capture a sense of the outside, and to evoke the shifts they awaken within. Diaphanous materials, in their translucency, call up for me the fabric of my inner nature - an intangible patchwork of veneers running off on tangents. I allow these to emerge through the use of translucent materials either found or generated by my practice, such as cleaning fluid, charcoal dust, chiffon, and resin.
sound
Music, as a creative discipline receptive to relations over time, is something I listen to incessantly. My love and inspiration for music catalyses my gestures and informs my choice of title and colour palette. I consider my surfaces as instruments, drawing impressions of live music in the form of abstracted ear-to-hand dances, and am indebted to the highly collaged and undefinable scope of sound productions.