This early work involved installing an elevator door mechansim in a hotel guest bedroom. The doors themselves had been replaced by a curtain of 4000 keys, referencing the vast number of previous occupants of the room. The piece began out of the consideration of the hotel as a microcosm of the city, and its setting within the Pulitzer Hotel Amsterdam was pivotal in its interaction with the architecture and the people who encountered it. This sense of an anonymous crowd has stayed in my work, recurring in dense accumulations of multiple objects.
Photography Henni van Beek
The original ideas came from a competition submission for the "Imaginary Hotel", but the title also references Sheherazade whose life is prolonged by her ability to narrate a story. I have always seen narrative as a facet of my Work, but rarely as a straightforward device. How do you tell a story that is so expansive?
There is a link here to a formative experience in Japan. In Sento Gosho, Kyoto there is a beach made of pebbles, each one of which had been wrapped in silk and carried from the foot of Mount Fuji. Exploring this heightened sense of the everyday is one of my guiding principles.
Photography Henni van Beek
